Group items tagged

Most economists agree that open source candidates have an information good[12] (also termed 'knowledge good') aspect. In general, this suggests that the original work involves a great deal of time, money, and effort.

Many fields of study and social and political views have been affected by the growth of the concept of open source.

Advocates in one field often support the expansion of open source in other fields. For example, Linus Torvalds said, "the future is open source everything."[14]

The difference between crowdsourcing and open source is that open source production is a cooperative activity initiated and voluntarily undertaken by members of the public

Open source hardware is hardware whose initial specification, usually in a software format, are published and made available to the public, enabling anyone to copy, modify and redistribute the hardware and source code without paying royalties or fees.

Beverages

Open-content projects organized by the Wikimedia Foundation — Sites such as Wikipedia and Wiktionary have embraced the open-content GFDL and Creative Commons content licenses.

Digital content

Health and science

Medicine Pharmaceuticals — There have been several proposals for open-source pharmaceutical development,[31][32] which led to the establishment of the Tropical Disease Initiative. Ther

Science Research — The Science Commons was created as an alternative to the expensive legal costs of sharing and reusing scientific works in journals etc.[33] Research — The Open Source Science Project was created to increase the ability for students to participate in the research process by providing them access to microfunding

Other Open source principles can be applied to technical areas such as digital communication protocols and data storage formats. Open design — which involves applying open source methodologies to the design of artifacts and systems in the physical world.

There are few examples of business information (methodologies, advice, guidance, practices) using the open source model, although this is another case where the potential is enormous. ITIL is close to open source. It uses the Cathedral model (no mechanism exists for user contribution) and the content must be bought for a fee that is small by business consulting standards (hundreds of British pounds). Various checklists are published by government, banks or accounting firms. Possibly the only example of free, bazaar-model open source business information is Core Practice.

The rise of open-source culture in the 20th century resulted from a growing tension between creative practices that involve appropriation, and therefore require access to content that is often copyrighted, and increasingly restrictive intellectual property laws and policies governing access to copyrighted content.

The idea of an "open source" culture runs parallel to "Free Culture," but is substantively different. Free culture is a term derived from the free software movement, and in contrast to that vision of culture, proponents of Open Source Culture (OSC) maintain that some intellectual property law needs to exist to protect cultural producers. Yet they propose a more nuanced position than corporations have traditionally sought. Instead of seeing intellectual property law as an expression of instrumental rules intended to uphold either natural rights or desirable outcomes, an argument for OSC takes into account diverse goods (as in "the Good life") and ends.

One way of achieving the goal of making the fixations of cultural work generally available is to maximally utilize technology and digital media. I

Government Open politics (sometimes known as Open source politics)

Ethics Open Source ethics

Ess famously even defined the AoIR Research Guidelines as an example of open source ethics.[38]

Media Open source journalism

Open source movie production is either an open call system in which a changing crew and cast collaborate in movie production, a system in which the end result is made available for re-use by others or in which exclusively open source products are used in the productio

OpenDocument is an open document file forma

Education Within the academic community, there is discussion about expanding what could be called the "intellectual commons" (analogous to the Creative Commons). Proponents of this view have hailed the Connexions Project at Rice University, OpenCourseWare project at MIT, Eugene Thacker's article on "Open Source DNA", the "Open Source Cultural Database" and Wikipedia as examples of applying open source outside the realm of computer software. Open source curricula are i

stead of keeping all such knowledge proprietary. One of the recent initiatives in scientific publishing has been open access — the idea that research should be published in such a way that it is free and available to the public.

Open innovation is

also a new emerging concept which advocate putting R&D in a common pool.

Arts and recreation Copyright protection is used in the performing arts and even in athletic activities. Some groups have attempted to remove copyright from such practices.[45]

Yet control over popular culture by mass media is clearly eroding

this paper investigates three relevant traditions of theory that address these overlaps: HCI, poststructuralism, and theories of technological determinism, especially in media.

Creativity—its nature, conditions of possibility, inputs and outputs, and processes—plays a major role in virtually all academic, professional, and artistic domains. As a result, it is heavily, and heterogeneously, theorized.

Genealogically, HCI developed alongside cognitive science and computer science, and was most often put in service of professional productivity software.

All of this is in service of what Schneiderman calls “evolutionary creativity,” which he illustrates as follows:“doctors making cancer diagnoses, lawyers preparing briefs, or photo editors producing magazine stories”(2002, p. 238). Here, Page 17 Creativity in Amateur Multimedia 15 and pervasive throughout the essay, Schneiderman’s notion of creativity appears to be paraphrasable as professional innovation: His interest is not artistic self-expression and, as we shall see, he is not alone in understanding creativity in terms of professional discourses

Again, creativity is understood as it relates to professional discourses, in this case the discourse of art history and its pedagogical presentation to museum-goers. Even analyses of group creativity in HCI contexts that seek to go beyond rationalist- individualist notions of creativity nonetheless operate in a rationalist mode.

The notion of creativity that emerges from these mainstream HCI essays places its agency primarily in the intentional activity of the individual (though the individual is presumably a member of relevant groups). It sees the ecology of creativity as a community of expert practice comprising research, dialogue, and artifact exchange, facilitated by social and computer environments that forgivingly compel an iterative and basically scientific (correctness, discrete information, classification, hypothesis) approach toward truth.

In this conceptualization of writing, creativity occurs at the level of discursive rule- transgressing. The role of the historical human in this process is greatly diminished, not because humans are not involved in textual production, but because the individual is at the wrong level of granularity for analysis. A given historical individual authoring discourse does so within complex interactions involving several selves and the clash of languages

Related, but not identical, to Foucault’s notion of authorship are theories of “intertextuality” put forward by Julia Kristeva and Roland Barthes. Intertextuality is the notion Page 19 Creativity in Amateur Multimedia 17 that a text is a “tissue” of (mis) quotations from other texts, considered to be more than mere collages, but transformative, of the sign systems from which they are derived (McAfee, 2004)

Creativity’s agency lies in the juxtaposition of sign systems (in which authorial identities are implicated), which occurs in the context of play, and results in artifacts that are significant not for what they say, but for the ways they materially contribute to the generative capacity of the discursive rule-set from which they operate.

Like Schneiderman (2002, 2003) and Foucault (1969/2000), Ellul (1964/2003, 1980/2003), too, is making claims about the origins and generation of knowledge in scientific discourses, but he situates the agency in the fierce pressures of technology as it overwhelms and often replaces the comparatively meek procedures of science and governance

As a result, according to Benjamin, our cognitive experience of the art also changes; whereas painting allows spectators to control their own stream of consciousness and reflect on what they see, cinema’s moving images disrupt association and contemplation, dominating viewers’ thoughts.

Benjamin’s (1936/1968) arguments are developed further by self-described technological determinist Marshall McLuhan, whose claim that “the medium is the message”(1964/2003) characterizes media as “extensions of ourselves” that “alter sense ratios or patterns of perception steadily and without any resistance”(p. 31).

For Manovich, the emergence of new visual languages is enabled not by an iterative, rational approach to innovation, as cognitive science might suggest; neither does it emerge from an evolutionary history of discursive transgression, as a poststructuralist approach might suggest 10. Rather, it is made possible by certain forms of productive convenience built into authoring tools that unleash visual languages and cultural logics that exceed any human intention, whether at the level of the individual or the group of experts.

A key first step is to understand how creativity is implemented in multimedia authoring software. Each program has ways it encourages authors to work. For example, Photoshop greatly rewards users who take advantage of layers, opening up avenues of possibility for compositing, nondestructive experimentation, and long-term editability. This in turn makes certain meanings (especially meanings created by the juxtapositions of spatial compositing) more easily realized than others. To what extent do contemporary authoring platforms encourage in the same ways (constituting and compelling a notion of digital creativity), or do different applications suggest different notions of digital creativity?

Science is based on building on, reusing and openly criticising the published body of scientific knowledge

For science to effectively function, and for society to reap the full benefits from scientific endeavours, it is crucial that science data be made open.

the instrumentalist's freedom is a function of the "narrative" structure of the piece

the instrumentalist's freedom is a function of the "narrative" structure of the piece

the instrumentalist's freedom is a function of the "narrative" structure of the piece,

the instrumentalist's freedom is a function of the "narrative" structure of the piece

the instrumentalist's freedom is a function of the "narrative" structure of the piece,

the instrumentalist's freedom is a function of the "narrative" structure of the piece, w

the new musical works referred to above reject the definitive, concluded message and multiply the formal possibilities of the distribution of their elements.

initiative of the individual performer

As he reacts to the play of stimuli and his own response to their patterning, the individual addressee is bound to supply his own existential credentials, the sense conditioning which is peculiarly his own, a defined culture, a set of tastes, personal inclinations, and prejudices. Thus, his comprehension of the original artifact is always modified by his particular and individual perspective. In fact, the form of the work of art gains its aesthetic validity precisely in proportion to the number of different perspectives from which it can be viewed and understood.

it is obvious that works like those of Berio and Stockhausen are "open" in a far more tangible sense.

Instead nowadays it is primarily the artist who is aware of its implications.

However, in this type of operation, "openness" is far removed from meaning "indefiniteness" of communication, "infinite" possibilities of form, and complete freedom of reception. What in fact is made available is a range of rigidly preestablished and ordained interpretative solutions,

and these never allow the reader to move outside the strict control of the author.

It is not that the four solutions of the allegorical passage are quantitatively more limited than the many possible solutions of a contemporary "open" work. As I shall try to show, it is a different vision of the world which lies under these different aesthetic experiences

Now if Baroque spirituality is to be seen as the first clear manifestation of modern culture and sensitivity, it is because here, for the first time, man opts out of the canon of authorized responses and finds that he is faced (both in art and in science) by a world in a fluid state which requires corresponding creativity on his part.

the new man's inventive role. He is no longer to see the work of art as an object which draws on given links with experience and which demands to be enjoyed; now he sees it as a potential mystery to be solved, a role to fulfill, a stimulus to quicken his imagination.

W. Y. Tindall, in his book on the literary symbol, offers an analysis of some of the greatest modern literary works in order to test Valéry's declaration that "il n'y a pas de vrai sens d'un texte" ("there is no true meaning of a text"). Tindall eventually concludes that a work of art is a construct which anyone at all, including its author, can put to any use whatsoever, as he chooses. This type of criticism views the literary work as a continuous potentiality of "openness"-in other words, an indefinite reserve of meanings. This is the scope of the wave of American studies on the structure of metaphor, or of modern work on "types of ambiguity" offered by poetic discourse.

Clearly, the work of James Joyce is a major example of an "open" mode, since it deliberately seeks to offer an image of the ontological and existential situation of the contemporary world.

Here the work is "open" in the same sense that a debate is "open." A solution is seen as desirable and is actually anticipated, but it must come from the collective enterprise of the audience. In this case the "openness" is converted into an instrument of revolutionary pedagogics.

the examples considered in the preceding section propose an "openness" based on the theoretical, mental collaboration of the consumer, who must freely interpret an artistic datum, a product which has already been organized in its structural entirety (even if this structure allows for an indefinite plurality of interpretations). On the other hand, a composition like Scambi, by Pousseur, represents a fresh advance.

it is clear that a composition such as Scambi poses a completely new problem. It invites us to identify inside the category of "open" works a further, more restricted classification of works which can be defined as "works in movement," because they characteristically consist of unplanned or physically incomplete structural units

If we turn to literary production to try to isolate an example of a work in movement," we are immediately obliged to take into consideration Mallarmé's Livre, a colossal and far- reaching work, the quintessence of the poet's production. He conceived it as the work which would constitute not only the goal of his activities but also the end goal of the world:

In every century, the way that artistic forms are structured reflects the way in which science or contemporary culture views reality.

Hence, it is not overambitious to detect in the poetics of the "open" work – and even less so in the "work in movement” – more or less specific overtones of trends in contemporary scientific thought.

The notion of "possibility" is a philosophical canon which reflects a widespread tendency in contemporary science; the discarding of a static, syllogistic view of order, and a corresponding devolution of intellectual authority to personal decision, choice, and social context.

The two-value truth logic which follows the classical aut-aut, the disjunctive dilemma between true and false, a fact and its contradictory, is no longer the only instrument of philosophical experiment. Multi-value logics are now gaining currency, and these are quite capable of incorporating indeterminacy as a valid stepping-stone in the cognitive process. In this general intellectual atmosphere, the poetics of the open work is peculiarly relevant: it posits the work of art stripped of necessary and foreseeable conclusions, works in which the performer's freedom functions as part of the discontinuity which contemporary physics recognizes, not as an element of disorientation, but as an essential stage in all scientific verification procedures and also as the verifiable pattern of events in the subatomic world.

This is not the place to pass judgment on the scientific validity of the metaphysical construct implied by Einstein's system. But there is a striking analogy between his universe and the universe of the work in movement

All these examples of "open" works and "works in movement" have this latent characteristic, which guarantees that they will al- ways be seen as "works" and not just as a conglomeration of random components ready to emerge from the chaos in which they previously stood and permitted to assume any form whatsoever.

Now, a dictionary clearly presents us with thousands upon thou- sands of words which we could freely use to compose poetry, essays on physics, anonymous letters, or grocery lists. In this sense the dictionary is clearly open to the reconstitution of its raw material in any way that the manipulator wishes. But this does not make it a "work." The "openness" and dynamism of an artistic work consist in factors which make it susceptible to a whole range of integrations. They provide it with organic complements which they graft into the structural vitality which the work already possesses, even if it is incomplete. This structural vitality is still seen as a positive property of the work, even though it admits of all kinds of different conclusions and solutions for it

already acknowledged as the general background to performance. These poetic systems recognize "openness" as the fundamental possibility of the contemporary artist or consumer.

But there is perhaps an even more important procedural issue around peer review. Whatever value it might have we largely throw away. Few journals make referee’s reports available, virtually none track the changes made in response to referee’s comments enabling a reader to make their own judgement as to whether a paper was improved or made worse. Referees get no public credit for good work, and no public opprobrium for poor or even malicious work. And in most cases a paper rejected from one journal starts completely afresh when submitted to a new journal, the work of the previous referees simply thrown out of the window.

We never ask what the cost of not publishing a paper is or what the cost of delaying publication could be.

There is a direct cost to rejecting papers, both in the time of referees and the time of editors, as well as the time required for authors to reformat and resubmit. But the bigger problem is the opportunity cost – how much that might have been useful, or even important, is never published? And how much is research held back by delays in publication? How many follow up studies not done, how many leads not followed up, and perhaps most importantly how many projects not refunded, or only funded once the carefully built up expertise in the form of research workers is lost?

Journals need to acknowledge the papers they’ve rejected, along with dates of submission. Ideally all referees reports should be made public, or at least re-usable by the authors.

Traditional peer review is hideously expensive. And currently there is little or no pressure on its contributors or managers to provide good value for money. It is also unsustainable at its current level. My solution to this is to radically cut the number of peer reviewed papers probably by 90-95% leaving the rest to be published as either pure data or pre-prints. But the whole industry is addicted to traditional peer reviewed publications, from the funders who can’t quite figure out how else to measure research outputs, to the researchers and their institutions who need them for promotion, to the publishers (both OA and toll access) and metrics providers who both feed the addiction and feed off it.

Indeed, an entire consumer subculture has sprung up around counterfeit goods in China, what Chinese refer to as shanzhai or, literally, "mountain village" products (the name comes from the fact that, in ancient times, bandits would often build their redoubts in high passes, out of reach of the short arm of the law). Though its name suggests something remote and marginal, in reality shanzhai is now a mainstream phenomenon. It's estimated, for instance, that one of every five cellphones produced in China -- some 150 million devices -- are shanzhai.

One could argue that, by duplicating existing feature sets while striving to offer more, shanzhai may actually be driving innovation (of sorts), contrary to the argument made by those who suggest that without airtight and infinitely extended IP protection, there's no incentive for the development of groundbreaking new products and technologies. Of course, the truth is somewhere in between. Not all of the "innovations" of shanzhai products are particularly useful (one shanzhai Blackberry Pearl clone offers a built-in electric razor, for instance). But the knockoffs have certainly exerted downward pressure on price, forced major brands to compete on quality and service, as opposed to perceived prestige and appearance, and derailed artificial constraints imposed by manufacturers and governments that are ultimately harmful to consumers.

Which explains why, when Apple finally partnered with China Unicom to officially introduce the iPhone to the market earlier this month, the response was tepid at best: The official iPhone was crippled at launch (its WiFi connectivity disabled by government mandate), cost a cool grand and was locked to the Unicom network. "The rumor -- it's all water cooler gossip at this point -- is that they sold around 5,000 units in the first week," says Lam. "That's a shockingly low number. But you have to consider that anyone who's wanted an iPhone in China has been able to get one for years now, unlocked, fully functional, at a cheaper price. The 'official' launch is meaningless -- the unofficial launch happened so long ago that no one even cares." The estimated tally of grey-market iPhones in use in China? More than 1.5 million.

in today's frictionless global market it's harder to put barriers between consumers and the stuff they want. If something is available anywhere, people can get it everywhere.

Welcome to contemporary Korea, where a titanic digital public works program in the '90s resulted in 85 percent of the population having home broadband access that's faster than anything commercially available in the U.S. "What they think is normal in Seoul is vastly different from what we think is normal here -- the stuff we read about in Popular Science, they take for granted," says DramaFever's Seung Bak. "A show will air on TV, and 10 minutes later it'll be uploaded in HD quality to a sharing site where anyone can download it in about 10 seconds." So Korea can be thought of as something of a laboratory for the future of digital media, because it's just a matter of time before the rest of the world's bandwidth catches up.

Call it the can't-beat-'em, might-as-well-join-'em syndrome. Strict enforcement has prompted an endless game of whack-a-mole, with pirates moving on to new platforms as their old ones are shut down. But by giving filesharers and sharing platform operators incentives to offer legal, licensed services -- while ensuring that the user experience their audiences have been drawn to remains the same -- a solution emerges that might just allow everyone to benefit.

Two strokes of good fortune helped CrunchyRoll survive, both occurring in the fall of 2008. The first was the cable channel Cartoon Network's surprising decision to cancel its venerable Toonami programming block -- for years one of the most reliable sources of anime on broadcast television. The second was an unique deal the company was able to negotiate with TV Tokyo, the broadcaster that airs more anime than any other Japanese network. "TV Tokyo controls 40 percent of Japan's anime series, and we were able to get them to agree to let us put episodes of their shows up on our site within one hour of broadcast," says Gao. "Not even Hulu can do that. It effectively means that we're the 'first window' for content. And the reason they agreed is that they know we're growing their audience: We're getting them viewers they'd never be able to access on their own."

The deal prompted other broadcasters to fall in line. Now, CrunchyRoll simulcasts English-subtitled editions of 20 out of the 40 anime programs currently on the air in Japan. Free programming is bookended with advertising; a premium option costing as little as $5 a month eliminates the ads, provides access to high-definition content and subscriber-only programming, and puts a little premium member badge on a user's profile. "That's more important than you'd think," says Gao. "One of the things we realized early on was that CrunchyRoll isn't just a video sharing site, it's a social network for fans of Japanese animation. The little badge is social proof that you're a real supporter of the site."

That partnership between content provider and consumer is exactly what's missing in the Western world's debate over intellectual property, where movie studios and record labels talk about their customers as potential criminals. In Asia, media companies have a much closer and more interactive relationship with fans, treating them as partners in evangelizing their products -- even when that means blurring the lines of copyright restrictions.

"They realize these unauthorized spinoffs help to build the fandom, and ultimately drive sales of the original," she says.

"Japanese tend to resolve things in extralegal fashion, whereas in the U.S., Disney will send out a whole battalion of lawyers," notes manga historian Fred Schodt. "It's not an exaggeration to say that much of the current state of U.S. copyright law has come about due to Disney's efforts to keep Mickey Mouse from falling into the public domain."

“In Opera Aperta, Eco argued that literary texts are fields of meaning, rather than strings of meaning, that they are understood as open, internally dynamic and psychologically engaged fields. Those works of literature that limit potential understanding to a single, unequivocal line are the least rewarding, while those that are most open, most active between mind and society and line, are the most lively (and, although valorizing terminology is not his business, best)

What the preceding entry leaves out is the historical context in which Eco puts openness. He feels that this type of work, open work, is the work of his age.

A sub-category of open work is work in movement which he describes as works which “characteristically consist of unplanned or physically incomplete structural units.”

Eco sees open work as essentially political; work that is open expresses a pluralistic worldview.

Work which is calling into question its own forms and assumptions has a valuable function – it teaches us how to operate with agency within a highly mediated world.

1) Eco sees science as driving the worldview of an age, to which art responds

Forty or more years after the essays in The Open Work were written do we live in a world where the openness of our habits of interpretation makes the openness of the text less crucial?

If we listen to those pirates of old, we'll learn that there is nothing sacred or natural about our basic ideas of intellectual property, he argues, characterizing those notions as imperfect conventions formed in and by the Industrial Revolution. In fact, he suggests, it may be time to cast our models of patents and copyright overboard.

This nemesis is a shadowy collective rather than a person. Johns calls it "the intellectual-property defense industry," and says it emerged in the 1970s or so, in the form of trade associations and entities like the Interpol Intellectual Property Action Group. He sees these groups as remarkable in that they bring together ex-military and police officials, surveillance techniques, and data-scrambling to try to stamp out piracy and in some cases to limit reform, in unprecedented ways. "One could certainly track, and perhaps account for, the increasing consistency of intellectual property in the age of globalization by following this expansion of its practical enforcement across new regions and realms," Johns writes in Piracy.

No piracy, we might say, no Enlightenment.