Licenses for Open Source Content Management
Every OSCOM meeting should probably have a discussion on licensing issues, but for OSCOM 3 this is especially important because we have the opportunity to interact with Harvard Law School and Berkman Center experts on this topic.
We could collect questions about licensing that need discussion, and submit them as topics to our legal panel. Might we use a tool like the Berkman Center's H2O Rotisserie software to get multiple rounds of thought on questions before the conference?
Is there a best license for open source CMS?
Should we survey the licenses in use? Summarize pros/cons for each?
One controversial point is that some open-source licenses appear to prohibit sales of software under any circumstances. The GPL, on the other hand, says it is "free as in free speech, not as in free beer." Are open-source licenses free as in free beer? Invite someone from the Open Source Initiative to participate? (Lawrence Rosen? At least virtually.)
www.fsf.org
www.opensource.org
The Open Source Definition explicitly says second and third parties may sell the software (or give it away). They do not say the creator may sell it. They do say this may be moot, since market economics will drive the price to zero. But this is not the case since many customers appear to prefer to pay the creators of a tool.
Richard Stallman's published remarks say that you can charge anything you want for commercial free software ("even a billion dollars").
But section 11 of the GPL says "BECAUSE THE PROGRAM IS LICENSED FREE OF CHARGE... This line does not prevent many companies from charging for free software.
Section 6 of the Open Source Definition says "No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor," usually interpreted to mean any price must be the same for all customers. This does not prevent MySQL from being free for non-profits and personal use, and have a fee for commercial use.
MySQL is licensed under a "dual license." They describe one as GPL, the other as "non-GPL." You pay for the latter, and then are directed to a download of what appears to be code identical to the GPL code. Does this make sense?
We might also discuss Creative Commons licensing, which applies to the content being managed.
www.creativecommons.org.
The OSCOM site mentions an "Open Content License," similar to Creative Commons
www.opencontent.org
Creative Commons uses RDF to attach the copyright metadata to content. Should we have a workshop on this process at OSCOM?
Digital Rights Management (Legal releases and clearances, automatic royalty collection mechanisms, etc.) begins with the metadata to identify authors and other owners of digital assets - text, audio, images, animation, video, flash, etc. How to attach RDF metadata to diverse assets is a subject open-source CMS vendors need to address. Again a Creative Commons collaboration suggests itself.
Content Authoring and Annotation APIs. The best moments to attach metadata - including the license - are at content creation, principal editing, and during legal clearances. The entertainment industry is automating metadata creation into the tools of their trade - cameras, recorders, video editing systems, streaming media compression engines, etc. Tagging tools like those for semantic tagging in general must be a familiar part of any CMS interface, with easy drop-down selection of appropriate XML templates. Dublin Core standard tags should be integrated, for example.
Bob Doyle
skyBuilders.com
bobdoyle@skybuilders.com