Chris Sakkas (Admin of the FOSsil Bank wiki and the Living Libre blog and Twitter feed.) has worked hard to collate current usage of terms in the free/open/libre domains. As readers of this blog will know there is wide variation in usage, some of it constructive, some of it deliberately obfuscatory. He writes:
Hi folks,
This is the first release of A Free, Libre and Open Glossary, which as you hopefully know by now defines terms like ‘free software’, ‘crowdsourcing’, ‘open access’ and so on. Thank you to everyone here who contributed advice and changes.
The Etherpad still exists as a living document. The PDF and ODT available for download are best thought of as a fork of the living document to put the glossary in an accessible, nicely-formatted and tightly-edited form.
Download the PDF and ODT here:
Read and contribute to the living document:
This is really valuable. If you don’t agree with his analysis there is a chance to feed back.
Here are some excerpts:
Free, libre and open (FLO)
The words ‘free’, ‘libre’ and ‘open’ are used synonymously or together
(F/O or FLO) to describe works that can be shared and adapted by any
person for any purpose without infringing copyright law. There may be
conditions to this use attached, if those conditions do not limit how the
work can be shared and adapted or who can share and adapt it.
This fairly simple definition is complicated by the number of terms
that describe the same or slightly different concept, such as free
software, open source software, open content and free cultural works.
In some cases, these terms are more restrictive: a work can be under a
FLO licence but not qualify as a free cultural work or open knowledge.
…
Making works FLO
There are three ways that a work might become FLO.
Statute
A piece of legislation could grant permissions outside of normal
copyright law. The most obvious example is the public domain, which
describes works outside of the area of copyright restrictions.
For a work to qualify as FLO, it must be usable by any person. Works
that are in the public domain in only some countries will not qualify.
Licence
There are hundreds of FLO licences. The benefits of such licences are
that they are ideally unambiguous and they apply in all jurisdictions.
Declaration
Some people simply express their intention that a work is free from
some or all copyright restrictions. They may not be interested in
applying a licence or may reject legalistic culture altogether.
A modern example is Nina Paley’s Copyheart:
” Copying is an act of love. Please copy.” (♡http://copyheart.org/)
These declarations are dangerous because their legal status is unclear.
Can it be reneged upon later (perhaps by inheritors)?
Folk musician Woodie Guthrie included a notice on his recordings:
‘This song is Copyrighted in U.S. … and anybody caught singin it
without our permission, will be mighty good friends of ourn, cause we
don’t give a dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We
wrote it, that’s all we wanted to do’.
A number of organisations still claim copyright over Guthrie’s songs.
…
a FLO licence cannot diminish existing rights and permissions. For example, the Open
Game License allows you to use content from the Dungeons & Dragons
roleplaying game, but only if you don’t use certain words like ‘yuan-ti’
and ‘illithid’. Since these words are not protected by copyright law, this
is an additional requirement—making the licence non-FLO.
…
Open access
There are two competing definitions of open access:
The broader one:
an open access work is a scholarly book or article that is available online for any person to access without charge.
The narrow definition of open access, established at the Budapest
Open Access Initiative: an open access work is one that is available
online for any person to access, distribute or use in any other way
without financial, legal or technical barriers and with no constraints
except those of the integrity of the work and attribution.
The latter definition effectively requires that open access works be
FLO. Unfortunately, the former definition has gained widespread
acceptance, and it is the one used throughout this glossary.
‘Gratis open access’ refers to baseline open access.
‘Libre open access’ has been used to refer to open access works that have fewer
copyright restrictions. Note that this is a loose use of ‘libre’: a work that
could only be shared noncommercially or verbatim would be ‘libre open
access’ even though it is not libre by standard usage.
‘Green open access’ describes a work that has been self-archived by
the author in a repository or on a website, after having been published
in the traditional way.
‘Gold open access’
describes a work that is immediately made available by its publisher.
Relationship to FLO:
Open access works are not necessarily FLO. They can be all rights reserved. While many FLO works are open access,
not all of them are. For example, the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike periodical
Fantastique Unfettered is FLO, but not available online or for no charge.
So if you believe that terminology should be carefully chosen, the this is a really valuable resource. And if you don’t agree with bits, help to change it.
Thanks for the shout-out, Peter!
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