Santa Cruz, CA
For the last decade Karsten has been teaching and living the open source way. As a member of Red Hat's premier community leadership team, he helps with various community activities in the Fedora Project and other projects Red Hat is involved in. As a 15 year IT industry veteran, Karsten has worked most sides of common business equations as an IS manager, professional services consultant, technical writer, and developer advocate.
Karsten lives in his hometown of Santa Cruz, CA with his wife and two daughters on their small urban farm, Fairy-Tale Farm, where they focus on growing their own food and nurturing sustainable community living.
Authored Comments
First, I must say that the Flat World Knowledge site works great and the tools look like a dream. It is awesome how educators can rearrange and edit down to the paragraph level for customizing textbooks for class. The philosophy in this article is spot-on. I congratulate you all on your successes thus far.
However, I'm still seeing <a href="http://iquaid.org/2009/02/07/free-and-open-texbook-fail/">the problem I saw a year ago</a>, that the content is all licensed in a non-free way. The NC variant of the CC license represents 100% of the site content licensing, based on a full audit I just did of the catalog. Considering all your arguments for movement toward free and open, I'm presuming you understand the social, community, and economic factors at work. Frankly put, free and open content are going to compete with more strength against proprietary variants, similar to software.
I hear your desire and plans to move the field of publishing forward. My concern is, doing this in a non-free and non-open content way is furthering some of the damage of the traditional publishing model.
What are your plans for modernizing this part of your licensing? Do you have a vision for removing this final freedom-restriction on the content?
What about offering a mix of free/open and non-free/open content licensing and seeing which texts are used in which ways? Let them truly compete in your marketplace.
Is this all part of your master plan to move from a non-free to a free and open model for textbook publishing? If so, can you please <a href="https://www.theopensourceway.org/wiki/How_to_loosely_organize_a_community#Start_open_marketing_soonest">reveal the timeline to us</a>?
There are real issues with a CC NC license, most of which are <a href="http://freedomdefined.org/Licenses/NC">discussed in this article on FreedomDefined.org</a>. <a href="http://iquaid.org/2009/02/07/free-and-open-texbook-fail/">I covered a fair amount in my previous blog post</a>.
The main thing is, the NC is a non-free license, in that it provides field of use restrictions. It is <i>not</i> considered to be a <a href="http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Licensing#Bad_Licenses_3">free and open content license according to Fedora Legal</a>.
I appreciate that in this article you did not make a direct equation with free and open source software, which was one of my deep concerns of last year. Claiming to be free and open when not really so is given the label of <i><a href="http://www.fauxpensource.org/">fauxpen</a></i>. Yet, I am concerned that, in looking through the Flat World Knowledge catalog, I see the up-front license field says "Creative Commons" without a link to the specific license, leaving an unclear impression.
From the parts of the customization tools I saw, the licensing is not mentioned in the initial pages. I found the actual license notice only when reading the book, either the original or the customized version.
By contrast, all examples in your article are clear on their licensing, and they most often choose the CC BY license (attribution required.) Finding this information is one or two clicks away from their front page.
Sage Bionetworks, behind the "open pharma" link, is still exploring licensing but has the site under the CC BY license and <a href="http://sagebase.org/INTRO/FAQ.html">otherwise seems to follow that philosophy</a>. As a site of scientific pursuit, a free and open content license that focuses on attribution seems natural.
Open Library recognizes that most of their work is not copyrightable, and <a href="http://openlibrary.org/about/license">specifies that for contributors</a>.
The Community College Open Textbook Collaborative has a site under the CC BY license and is <a href="http://www.collegeopentextbooks.org">using a definition of open textbook that does not require free-as-in-freedom</a>. When you dig through the catalog there is a mix of licensing, including free and non-free variants. I looked over each page and my impression was a mix of 66% free and 33% non-free. Obviously, the free content is going to improve over time in usage and contribution, where the others are more likely to remain static.
Connexions seems to have all work under the CC BY license, as per <a href="http://cnx.org/aboutus/">their philosophy</a>.
Flat World Knowledge has a lot of promise to be a game changer here, especially with the strong ties in your leadership team back to traditional publishing. But until you can truly free your content, <a href="https://www.theopensourceway.org/wiki/What_your_organization_does_wrong_when_practicing_the_open_source_way#Only_part_way_to_free_and_open_leaves_you_in_limbo">you are going to have none of the supposed benefits of the traditional publishing model and not enough of the benefits of the free and open source model</a>.
I've done a few versions myself for the text/download (PDF and HTML), but haven't established a release schedule yet. I think the groundwork is nicely laid for a print-on-demand version, and I'm sure we'll do that in the near future.
Personally, I want to see the parts of the book filled that need more examples and content before I'll recommend chopping down trees and preparing vats of ink. :)