Post Syndicated from ris original http://lwn.net/Articles/687626/rss
Jeffrey Pomerantz and Robin Peek seek to
disambiguate the word “open”, as it is used or misused today. Examples
include open source, open access, open society, open knowledge, open
government, and so on.
“From the common ancestor Free Software, the term “open” diversified, filling a wide range of niches. The Open Source Definition gave rise to a number of other definitions, articulating openness for everything from hardware to knowledge. Inspired by the political philosophy of openness, the Open Society Institute funded the meeting at which the Budapest Open Access Initiative declaration was created. Open Access then gave rise to a wide range of other opens concerned with scholarship, publication, and cultural heritage generally. This spread of openness can be seen as the diversification of a powerful idea into a wide range of resources and services. It can also be seen more importantly as the arrival, society-wide, of an idea whose time has come … an idea with political, legal, and cultural impacts.”
(Thanks to Paul Wise)