Open is the new closed
One of my favourite journal articles of all time, Fifty shades of open by Jeffrey Pomerantz and Robin Peek, was published a decade ago:
Open source. Open access. Open society. Open knowledge. Open government. Even open food. The word “open” has been applied to a wide variety of words to create new terms, some of which make sense, and some not so much. This essay disambiguates the many meanings of the word “open” as it is used in a wide range of contexts.
Since that time, the waters around 'open' have become even muddier with companies playing fast and loose with the already unproductively-ambiguous term:
- OpenAI – Develops ChatGPT and generative AI models for consumers, businesses and developers. Although it releases open-weight models, including gpt-oss under the Apache 2.0 licence, its core hosted services are proprietary
- OpenTable – Provides restaurant discovery and table bookings, as well as reservation and restaurant-management tools. Its platform is proprietary with restrictive terms around reuse and reverse engineering.
- OpenText – Sells enterprise software for document and content management, cybersecurity, analytics and business workflows. Its standard software licence explicitly treats source code as a trade secret and restricts modification, redistribution and reverse engineering.
- OpenSea – Runs a marketplace for NFTs and other blockchain-based tokens. Its branded platform operates under a restrictive licence rather than an open-source licence, although some underlying components (e.g. the Seaport trading protocol) are open-source.
- OpenGov – Provides cloud software to government organisations. Despite the name, the software itself is proprietary, with its customer agreements retaining ownership and intellectual-property rights. It merely grants customers limited rights to use the hosted service.
This is satirised by OpenFatigue™, a site which raises a wry smile from people like me who have tried to spend their entire career working openly, and encouraging others to do likewise.
Source: Original article · Are.na block · TechFreedom channel
Image: Ian Taylor