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Openness is undeniably cool right now, at least if you move in the slightly odd circles that I do. Openly available scientific papers are disrupting the world of scholarly publishing (which may not be all good, but that’s a post for another day). Openly available university courses are finally beginning to work out how to offer meaningful accreditation to students. Openly accessible data from government agencies around the world bulks out almost every data marketplace, and anchors many an analysis. Openly available code for cloud infrastructure or networking is challenging the hold of the tech world’s giants. Everywhere you look, ‘incumbents’ are apparently being ‘challenged’ and ‘disrupted’ by the power of open.

The truth, of course, is a little more complex and a lot more nuanced, as business models shift and evolve just like they always have. In sustainable systems, some people still need to be rewarded (often through being paid) for their effort. And in sustainable systems, paying someone can often be a pretty straightforward means of ensuring that you have a throat to choke if something breaks; big companies adopting open source often seek a proper financial relationship with someone who installs and maintains the ‘free’ software or hardware they’re depending upon.

One area of openness that I’ve been involved with for about ten years is that of open licensing for both creative works and data. And it’s come a very long way.

Here in Europe, for example, the (badly flawed) 2003 Public Sector Information Directive is under review, and there’s every likelihood that the replacement will make a number of sensible moves toward greater openness, transparency, and reusability for publicly funded data. As the EPSI Platform site notes today, Andrés Nin proposes going a step further than the European Commission is currently contemplating, by instituting a common open license across Europe;

“The creation of a single public information re-use space in Europe requires much more, it requires a common European OpenData license applicable to all data generated by European public administrations.”

I would certainly welcome a model license that European member states might be enabled to use. I’d also welcome — and support — vigorous efforts to dissuade individual member states or ministries from their usual practice of tweaking and otherwise modifying perfectly good documents in order to demonstrate how ‘special’ or ‘different’ their circumstances apparently are. When will they all realise that they are neither as special nor as different as they like to think?

But — and it’s a big but — it seems unwise, premature, and unhelpful to even begin to suggest that such a license might be mandated across Europe. It isn’t required, and attempts to develop a single document that everyone could accept would be an unhelpful distraction that would result in something so bureaucratic, so ringed in opt-outs and prevarications, as to be utterly worthless. It would also, in all likelihood, be one of those exercises in which the process very quickly subsumed the point. A prime candidate for, in the words of an old boss, being too busy to be effective.

Related articles

• Branding academic publishers ‘enemies of science’ is offensive and wrong (guardian.co.uk)
• Open Data: Europe Starts to Get It (opendotdotdot.blogspot.com)
• Open Data in Europe gets a huge boost from new EU rules (thenextweb.com)

For various reasons, I was unable to make it to Virginia for the event, but a scan through the presentations from Leigh, Tom Heath (another former colleague), Jordan Hatcher (with whom I worked on earlier iterations of the Open Data Commons license), and Creative Commons‘ Kaitlin Thaney, it looks like they did a great job covering the bases on this critically important aspect of the evolving Data Web.

If we are to encourage the sorts of break-out use of data that Tim Berners-Lee and Tim O’Reilly were discussing at last week’s Web 2.0 Summit, we need to move past the current laissez-faire approaches adopted by too many and ensure that there are licensing regimes in place to enable, facilitate and encourage widespread re-use.

As Leigh’s work demonstrates, we have a long way to go. Only around a third of the current Linked Data projects are explicitly licensing their content, and several of those may be mis-licensing by applying copyright-based licenses such as those from Creative Commons to data not covered by copyright legislation.

With the current state of data licensing, and the reliance of CC0 and Open Data Commons’ Public Domain Dedication and License upon the public domain as a means of overcoming territorial differences, will we find enterprise use of Linked Data increasingly relying upon the more cumbersome tool of contract law… to the detriment of a free and flexible exchange of ideas?

‘Linked Open Data Rights Survey‘ image by Leigh Dodds, shared on Flickr under a Creative Commons license.

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• ISWC linked data and the law (opencontentlawyer.com)
• Iswc2009 I. (ivan-herman.name)
• CC0 endorsed in Nature opinion piece (sciencecommons.org)
• Linked Data: Interpretants and Interpretation (phaneron.rickmurphy.org)

My latest podcast is with John Wilbanks, the VP at Creative Commons with responsibility for their Science Commons project.

John has a varied background that includes founding a bio-informatics startup, Harvard’s Berkman Center, the World Wide Web Consortium and the US Congress.

In his current role at Science Commons, he is working to ensure that the outputs of publicly funded science become more available; both for other scientists to use, and for the wider public. The successes of the Open Access movement have led to greater visibility for scientific papers, but the data upon which those papers depend still tends to be difficult to locate.

We discuss initiatives at Science Commons and elsewhere, and consider some of the barriers to a change in approach.

Production of this podcast was supported by Talis, and show notes are available on their Xiphos blog.

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• MIT opens access to its research articles (cbc.ca)
• Wilbanks’ talk on ‘Knowledge Interoperability’ from CSE now online (sciencecommons.org)
• Open Science, Closed Source (opendotdotdot.blogspot.com)
• Sage – Open Access Data from Merck (joi.ito.com)

Walk-on parts during the hour-long streamed presentation included two recent podcast victims; EUCALYPTUS Project Director Rich Wolski and RightScale CEO Michael Crandell, both of whom pledged support.

Sun’s official announcement is here.

Sun has also released A Guide to Getting Started with Cloud Computing, which offers a useful overview of the basic issues whilst relegating most of the Sun pitch to a separate section.

GoGrid have, of course, already released an equivalently licensed API of their own.

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• Sun looks for new direction for Network.com (news.cnet.com)
• Sun takes another swing at cloud computing (infoworld.com)