If you asked me to name the topic I’d class as my core academic specialisation, you’d probably guess artificial intelligence, and you’d be wrong, or at least premature, that one came later. The real answer is openness: open access, open source, open content, the Commons, non-proprietary licensing. This was the subject of my first publications, the core of my first years as a researcher, one that I have carried through many years of teaching, and while most of my recent publications have been centred around other subjects, my interest in the Commons has never waned.
It has been interesting to see the evolution of the subject, I still remember going to conferences in which lawyers and experts representing proprietary software (cough Microsoft cough) were brought in to minimise and mock open source software. I went to workshops where traditional copyright experts would say that open licences were not valid. And yet open source won as the prevalent software development model in the world, and eventually even Microsoft would adopt it. In the content space, Creative Commons became the de facto licensing standard for open access publishing, and millions of users benefitted from open content. Data and databases would follow suit. I stopped writing about the subject from a legal perspective because all of the interesting legal debates were over. Open licences were found to be valid in dozens of court decisions across common and civil law jurisdictions. Licences reached a maturity level with GPL v3 and CC 4.0. There were still some interesting legal challenges in software patents, databases, and interoperability, but for the most part the debate was over, open source was here to stay.
But something interesting happened in line with the practical success, and it was that we started to forget what it all meant. I have been teaching open source as part of my courses for many years, and I started to notice that your average student had never heard of open source or even Creative Commons, even though they were familiar with many products such as Wikipedia and open access journals; and this is from law students, who are usually better informed than the average user. The general knowledge outside of software development and content creation has also been dire, with some outrageous misunderstandings of licensing and openness becoming the norm.
So this post is an attempt to serve as a reminder of the core concepts behind openness, why it still matters, and why it is more important now than ever.
Openness
It is difficult to put together the concepts of openness in a few paragraphs, because no matter how you do it, there will always be something important left out. There are various manifestos, definitions, licences, books, articles, and projects that contribute to what is known as openness that it feels unfair to try to distil this richness into a single concept, but I’ll try.
If I were to encapsulate the ideals of openness in one word, I would use “sharing”; other words come close, such as commons, participation, and community, but sharing is probably the most important concept, and one that still baffles many people to this day. The overarching principle in openness is that you share with others what you create, be it music, photographs, code, or text. This sharing is often done with a licence that allows others to benefit from those resources without fear of litigation. But why would anyone share their creations with others with no remuneration? The key is the other word that can describe openness, and that is community. You share works with a community that also shares, and that means that while others benefit from your sharing, you also benefit from the sharing of others. This is participation which creates corpus of works that can be freely used by others in their own works. This is a simple idea that breaks some people’s minds, but it works, modern software development is a great example that this ideal is viable. Why would you make your works available to others? Because others will do the same for your benefit.
There are more complex ways of describing openness from economic, legal, and philosophical perspectives, but the above is the core of the idea. Share and participate in a community of peers. As I mentioned this works particularly well in software, in other creative fields there are a lot of works shared as well in this manner, but not with the same numbers and dominance that we see in software. The second largest sector where openness works is in academic publishing under the guise of open access.The idea is that academic writers share their articles to other researchers, the incentive is that you are able to access a wealth of knowledge from others, while also having more people reading your own research. This works better than in other creative industries in great part because of public funding and incentives, where often public funding is given with the requirement that the resulting outputs should be made available to the public with permissive licences.
Why is it important?
The argument in favour of openness has been made by much smarter people than me, but it is always good to serve up some reminders. Having access to free resources means that you can get started in an enterprise much easier than if you had to start from scratch; over the last couple of decades it is remarkable how many of the big names in tech that we have today got started with fewer staff than normal thanks to the building blocks provided by open source software. In content creation, tens of thousands of videos on YouTube have benefitted by one composer who has made hundreds of compositions available under Creative Commons licensing royalty-free; Kevin MacLeod is one of the most popular composer on the Web, a legend in his own right who personifies the ethics of sharing by making his musical compositions free to use, and that has allowed thousands of creators get started without having to infringe copyright or pay exorbitant royalties. If you need pictures, there are image repositories and even stock photography. The word “democratisation” is over-used, but when it comes to openness, it really is that, content that allows others to participate in a community of other creators and lowers the barriers of entry for newcomers.
The sharing comes at a cost however, and that is one reason why openness has been suffering recently, particularly in left-leaning spaces. The greatest advantage of open source and open content is that anyone can use the tools, but that is also its greatest disadvantage, as everyone you don’t like can also use the code or content that you shared. For many of us this was a trade-off that we were willing to make because the benefits would go to the greatest number of people, countless developers in the global south can have access to free code, but so does Apple and Microsoft. So for many, open source became synonymous with gifting your hard work to large corporations for free.
There are ways to tackle this, such as non-commercial clauses in CC licences, or copyleft clauses in software, which are ways to impose restrictions on what people can do with the shared content. But the reality is that openness will always benefit big tech companies as well as smaller creators and developers. Again, it’s a trade-off.
For me, it is a trade-off that I’m willing to make. Not only that, if you are left-leaning, or a Libertarian, or you are sceptical of big tech, the only way through is with openness. The only way we will become less dependent on big tech is through the deployment and development of viable open alternatives. This is easier said than done, but I just don’t see any other alternative.
Shaming people into not using big tech will never work, free software developers have been trying that for over two decades, and yet the fabled Linux desktop revolution never came. I was once one of those who thought that I could lead change through sheer bloody-mindedness, installing Linux on my laptop, creating an open source journal… it didn’t work. I remember very well the moment I decided to give up on Linux, it was actually immortalised in a picture, it happened when I saw Larry Lessig’s Macbook, I switched and never looked back.
Andres decides to buy a Mac on the spot.
But the revolution will happen by making it easier for people to switch, while I still have a Macbook, I recently re-installed Linux on an old gaming computer to install and run open source AI models, and it has been an exhilarating experience that reminded me why I loved open source in the first place.
Inside you there are two wolves.
Interestingly, I think that there may be wider recognition that openness is the way through. I am not religious in the slightest, but I found myself reading Pope Leo XIV’s latest encyclical letter Magnifica Humanitas because it contains some interesting things about intellectual property. In the document, the Pope says:
“67. Today, among the goods that are universally intended for everyone, we must also include new forms of property, such as patents, algorithms, digital platforms, technological infrastructure and data. In a context where the wealth of nations depends increasingly on knowledge and technology, when these goods remain concentrated in the hands of a few, without adequate forms of sharing and access, a new imbalance is created that contradicts the universal destination of goods. In turn, it widens the gap between the included and the excluded, between those who can participate in the digital revolution and those who remain on the margins. Furthermore, care for our common home and our responsibility toward the poor and future generations require that the use of the goods of creation and the new possibilities offered by technology be regulated in such a way as to respect the environment, avoid waste and prevent new forms of exploitation.”
This sounds like open source (and copyright minimalism, but I digress…).
The above is true now, just as it was true back in the 80s when many of the principles of openness came into being. The way through is in the Commons. This is why openness remains as relevant today as it has ever been.
Concluding
I’m not ashamed to admit that I’ve been a believer in openness for many years, and everything I do, everything I write, has always been directed towards that and in service of those principles. I’m also an unashamed technophile, I think that the only way we’ll survive is using technology and making it work for us. In the age of environmental chaos, I honestly believe that the only way we’ll survive is through technological advancement. As a life-long social democrat, I also think that technology should be at our service to improve our lives. It is true that many of may fellow people on the left have become sceptical of technology, but I hope that we will get to some balance in the end. Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism only can be achieved through technological adoption after all.
But the technology of the oligarchy will not do, only open source, open content, and the Commons can get us there. This is why openness is as important and relevant as ever.
This ended up being more political than I intended when I started writing… on the meantime I really should do something about that tangle of cables behind my computer.
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