An interesting question relating to open content from Brian Kelly:
But should I be taking a more liberal approach, I wonder? Should I permit commercial exploitation of the content? This, after all, has been the approach taken in the open source world, which provides an environment for commercially-viable software vendors to thrive.
First, let me state my “expertise”. I do not consider myself an expert in open content issues but I do have over 10 years in active open source development. This does not entitle me to a fully considered answer to Brain’s question, in fact it may cause me to confuse the two issues. However, as ever I do have an opinion, so here it is…
Open Source allows commercial exploitation in order to provide a reason for people to contribute, there are many others but this one is often the clincher, especially for sizeable contributions. Commercial use of open source works because the value of most software is not in the software itself but in the provision of value-add services around the software.
Another common reason for creating and managing open source software is to add value to a brand. In this case the originating organisation doesn’t care about making money from the software, instead they want is to spread their brand as far and wide as possible. So commercial re-use is just another way to spread their brand message to a wide audience.
I would suggest that, when deciding to allow commercial re-use of open content, one needs to think about where the value of the content is for you. Unlike software it is not easy for people to add value to content. There are exceptions to this, such as Wikipedia, but they are the exception rather than the rule. Consequently, the idea of allowing commercial re-use of content to attract new contributors is not normally applicable, but brand enhancement through wider re-use may be a different story.
In this post I am aware that I have greatly simplified the business models for open source and open content. I’ve kept things simple in an attempt to focus on the important issue - is commercial use complimentary to our objectives in creating content?
Personally I see no reason why Brian should not allow commercial reuse of his content, just as OSS Watch does. In OSS Watch’s case we are paid to produce our content in order to enable us to share information and encourage comment on our developing understanding of a domain. If someone can help in that aim by using our outputs in a commercial setting what harm can it do?
I’m sure Brian would appreciate your thoughts on whether he should allow commercial reuse. Here at OSS Watch we would love to hear if anyone thinks we have made the wrong decision.
Well I’ve decided in favour of permissive licenses like BSD for my software project Jambu. My decision process included the thoughts you mention plus a couple more.
1) GPL like licences make the decision about whether to use Free software non-trivial. For example what exactly does ‘link’ in the viral clause mean? Plus GPL rights protection starts to take energy in worrying about enforcement and that is a little step along the road of proprietary paranoia.
2) Jambu is assistive technology and the real value add is that people with disabilities get a better deal. So if someone takes it as the basis for a commercial proprietary product I’m happy as long as in the big picture that causes a better deal for users. Hopefully they will feed back to me anyway, either explicitly or implicitly by raising expectations.
OK so there is a danger of proprietary ’stealing’ or hijacking but I think that is minimal.
Thanks for your comments Steve.
I’ve never really thought of enforcement of the GPL as being “a little step along the road of proprietary paranoia”, it is certainly an interesting take. One does need to pick which battles to fight when enforcing a licence and the GPL with its “viral” stipulation does increase the number of potential battles you may need to fight.
Of course, the fundamental believe of the FSF that all software must be Free is key to the GPL and that is why the FSF are willing to assist with enforcing the GPL.
I also agree that there are problems with the language used in the rather complex GPL licence. All legal documents are open to many different interpretations. I agree that the simpler a licence can be the less likely it is to be misinterpreted, this is why many people, who are not concerned with enforcing software freedom through the licence, prefer the simpler “permissive” licences.
Your point about using a permissive licence to get stuff like assistive technologies into the wider environment is a very important one. For the same reasons, many people claim that permissive licences for reference implementations of open standards help ensure that that standard is more widely adopted.
I guess your first point is a new one, to translate it to the open content question that this post addresses I guess content authors need to consider whether they are ever likely to pursue commercial use of their content. I’d guess that unless someone were making considerable money from your content you probably wouldn’t bother. So the question then becomes, “just how much is my content really worth?” (very few people get rich from selling books for example).