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The great Open Source giveaway

By Graham Lawton - posted Monday, 15 July 2002


Software released under the GPL can be copied, modified and distributed by anyone, as long as they, too, release it under a copyleft. That restriction is crucial, because it prevents the material from being co-opted into later proprietary products.

It also makes open source software different from programs that are merely distributed free of charge. In FSF's words, the GPL "makes it free and guarantees it remains free."

Open source has proved a very successful way of writing software. But it has also come to embody a political stand - one that values freedom of expression, mistrusts corporate power, and is uncomfortable with private ownership of knowledge. It's "a broadly libertarian view of the proper relationship between individuals and institutions", according to open source guru Eric Raymond.

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But it's not just software companies that lock knowledge away and release it only to those prepared to pay. Every time you buy a CD, a book, a magazine, even a can of Coca-Cola, you're forking out for access to someone else's intellectual property.

Your money buys you the right to listen to, read or consume the contents, but not to rework them, or make copies and redistribute them. No surprise, then, that people within the open source movement have asked whether their methods would work on other products. As yet no one's sure - but plenty of people are trying it.

One popular target is the music industry. At the forefront of the attack is the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco group set up to defend civil liberties in the digital society. In April of last year, the EFF published a model copyleft called the Open Audio License (OAL). The idea is to let musicians take advantage of digital music's properties - ease of copying and distribution - rather than fighting against them.

Musicians who release music under an OAL consent to their work being freely copied, performed, reworked and reissued, as long as these new products are released under the same licence. They can then rely on "viral distribution" to get heard. "If the people like the music, they will support the artist to ensure the artist can continue to make music," says Robin Gross of the EFF.

It's a little early to judge whether the OAL will capture imaginations in the same way as OpenCola. But it's already clear that some of the strengths of open source software simply don't apply to music. In computing, the open source method lets users improve software by eliminating errors and inefficient bits of code, but it's not obvious how that might happen with music.

In fact, the music is not really "open source" at all. The files posted on the OAL music website so far are all MP3s and Ogg Vorbises - formats which allow you to listen but not to modify.

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The problems with open music haven't put people off trying open source methods elsewhere. Encyclopedias, for example, look like fertile ground. Like software, they're collaborative and modular, need regular upgrading, and improve with peer review.

But the first attempt, a free online reference called Nupedia, hasn't exactly taken off. Two years on, only 25 of its target 60,000 articles have been completed. "At the current rate it will never be a large encyclopedia," says editor-in-chief Larry Sanger. The main problem is that the experts Sanger wants to recruit to write articles have little incentive to participate. They don't score academic brownie points in the same way software engineers do for upgrading Linux, and Nupedia can't pay them.

A year ago, frustrated by the treacle-like progress of Nupedia, Sanger started another less formal encyclopedia named Wikipedia - in which anyone can write or edit an article on any topic. But it also explains its success. Wikipedia contains 19,000 articles and is acquiring several thousand more each month. "People like the idea that knowledge can and should be freely distributed and developed," says Sanger.

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This article was first published in New Scientist.  The original article can be found here.



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About the Author

Graham Lawton is a journalist for New Scientist.

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