Open content

From dKosopedia

There are major bodies of open content growing on the World Wide Web:

• the GFDL corpus based on the GFDL corpus namespace and a network of GFDL corpus access providers, centering on Wikipedia and mediawiki
• the CC-by-nc-sa non-commercial Share Alike content being distributed by many nonprofit research and advocacy groups, political parties and other entities that do not with to give their work for free to commercial enterprises but don't mind letting Donald Rumsfeld use it - since he's technically "nonprofit"

There have been proposals for narrower more specialized open content efforts that would apply tighter or different restrictions than "non-commercial", e.g.

• at Creative Commons a peace license has been proposed to restrict use for war or even policing or in certain countries or agencies
• at Creative Commons a green license has been proposed to restrict use for war or even policing or in certain countries or agencies, and also to prevent or limit use in any unsustainable industry such as logging or fishing
• at Creative Commons a science license has been proposed to restrict use of material to legitimate practitioners of scientific method and prevent any quoting or citation or use of statistics for pseudo-science or just lies.

What all open content efforts have in common is share-alike provisions for content distribution: if you get access to the text under an open content license, you will be expected to distribute it to others under exactly the same license, whether you like that license or not.

This is very distinct from "open source" efforts in software which have no such provision, except for the subset of open source called "free software". In particular open source and free software both forbid distinguishing users based on what they do, or what field they're in, or who they are. This has been controversial, but it's typical of technocrats to ignore the argument that their technology can be used for good or for ill, and they should avoid the ill.