Dokeos:Community Portal
From Dokeos
Contents |
On this wiki
- Users - a list of organisations and users that have some presence on this wiki. For a much larger list of Dokeos-using organisations, see the Dokeos website community page.
About our vision, openness and freedom
Discussion text about what it means to be open and/or free. Several people will have different views about this, do not hesitate to explain your view.
Are we open?
We are supposed to be an "open source software community" and we give importance to the word "open". However, I think we all have our own vision of what the word "open" means. "Open" is quite a vague word and everyone feels comfortable in it. No one sees himself as a closed person. It would not be very trendy. People who are opposed (closed) to free entrance for dogs in libraries argue that they are open to silence and concentration. And I think they are right in this argument.
The extension problem
For some of us, "open" goes much further than just the source. Many would like to have an open mind, belong to an open community, be an open person, be open to change, open to other people... The word has clearly a political meaning. For some of us, it sounds probably more left swing than right wing. And for some, "open" means an open world where the thirld world has a decent place, where there is a North-South dialogue, where there is no exclusion. Exclusion would relate to a closed world in this sense. Also, open source can help to fill the gap / cross the divide.
For some others, "open" in "open source" just relates to the source. It is more a method than a philosophy. Releasing the code as a public thing is cheaper, better and faster. It allows more, gives a better software. Maybe is it not opposed to creating economic value and doing big business. Consider the IBM, Sun, Apple, Red Hat Open Source strategy.
I would reasonably argue that the vast majority of us situates between those two extremes. Open source is a method but also a bit more than that. Or it is a philosophy, but it is a practical one.
Open decisions
Right now, we already publish all our meeting agenda and meeting minutes, which brings us some much appreciated openness. But decision making is still a very closed process: we decide at closed meetings, nobody can actually see our decision process.
We can improve on this. It does not mean we have to give a vote to everyone on our forums, not does it means we should be using polls to make decisions, that only leads to fake democracy. We have had some open meetings, via chat, but the inherent limitations of the medium made many things difficult. Using the forum for decision making however, has worked in many cases. We've been able to gather ideas for implementation, reach decisions, make adjustments, and more through the forum, which means the whole process is visible to all.
The only thing that we can justify holding back are some critical security bugs. It is apparently common for open soure projects to hold the publiation of these bugs for a few days, up to two weeks, when a bugfix becomes available.
The economic model
Everyone would like to be open. The question is: how is it possible to become and to remain open? Who is going to pay for our open activities? How will we eat if we give everything instead of selling it. And does open mean "not commercial"? For civil servants like teachers or ministry employees, the question appears differently. Paid with public money their question is "does my mission include that I participate to the creation of open resources"? For private companies and organisations, the question: how to simultaneously release resources in the open domain and still earn money. This question is commonly called the "open business model" question. Eric S. Raymond has analysed this in his book "The Cathedral and the Bazaar". Some models are: give the product sell the srvices. But the model seems to work better for some software than others and better for software than content.
The Open Content Business Model
How can we simultaneously release content in the public domain and earn money at the same time. Some models exist like: release a standard course and sell customisation or release one course and sell another or release a course and sell tutoring. The problem is that content creation is a costly process and services do not pay it.
Free as in Freedom
Some people prefer to talk about Free Software, instead of Open Source. Free Software is the original term, used by Richard Stallman who invented the GNU GPL, the license behind most free software / open source projects. He always says this refers to "Free as in free speech, not free beer". In later years the term Open Source became invented and widely used.
According to the Free Software Foundation:
Free Software is a matter of liberty not price. For the Free Software movement, non-free software is a social problem and free software is the solution.
Fear of Freedom
The main argument for the term "open source software" is that "free software" makes some people uneasy. That's true: talking about freedom, about ethical issues, about responsibilities as well as convenience, is asking people to think about things they might rather ignore. This can trigger discomfort, and some people may reject the idea for that. It does not follow that society would be better off if we stop talking about these things.
