“Openwashing” is a term derived from ” greenwashing” to refer to dubious vendor claims about openness. Openwashing brings the old “open vs. proprietary” debate back into play – not as “which one is better” but as “which one is which?”
Excerpted from Klint Finley:
Klint asks: What does it mean to be open? And how can you tell if a product is really “open”?
“Take NASA’s experience with Eucalyptus Systems as an example. NASA’s Chris Kemp told The Register that the space agency had concerns that Eucalyptus’s open source private cloud computing solution couldn’t scale to meet the agency’s needs. NASA engineers tried to contribute some new code to Eucalyptus to make it more scalable, but Eucalyptus rejected the contributions because they conflicted with code available in a closed source version it sold.
The source code that NASA was using was available, fulfilling at least one definition of the term “open source.” But it wasn’t open for contributions from outside and Eucalyptus served as a gatekeeper for the product. Eucalyptus didn’t mislead customers – it was upfront about the existence of its proprietary offerings – but by some standards its product wasn’t open. Eucalyptus has recently made moves towards being a more open company. What is “Open”?
Openness can perhaps be best thought of as a scale rather than a binary state. Simon Phipps of the Open Standard Initiative (OSI) has suggested the creation of an Open Source Scorecard. Until such a thing exists, what can you do evaluate the openness of a product or solution?
Michael Coté of the analyst firm Red Monk says that in some cases openwashing is mere ignorance – a company’s decision makers don’t realize what really goes into making something truly open. In others, it’s a matter of opinion. There’s a lot of fine print involved, and not everyone agrees on what “open” is.
Gil Yehuda, the director of open source at Yahoo, says that a lot of companies are willing to release code but are reluctant to take contributions. “That’s not really what open source is all about, but it does accomplish something,” he says. Yehuda cites transparency, trust, motivation to write better code, and recognition for contributors as some of the benefits of such an arrangement.
But Yehuda says accepting contributions has its own benefits, such as “crowdsourcing bug-fixes, evolving the project in novel directions, and building real partnership with the community.”
He also offers a number of criteria to be used in determining openwashing:
“Complete the following steps to determine in which ways a product or solution is open.
1. Check the License
2. Evaluate the Community and Governance
3. Beware “Open Core” Software
4. Read the Terms of Service for “Open” APIs”
In Scotland we have three verdicts in criminal proceedings: the absolutes of Guilty and Not Guilty, and the indeterminate verdict of ‘Not Proven’.
The problem with conventional intellectual property rights is that while Closed = Proprietary/Copyright and Open = CopyLeft licenses may be hybridised (eg Creative Commons) they all remain jurisdiction-bound absolute forms of licensing which do not interact adequately with the protocols which constitute conventional Finance Capital eg Equity and Debt.
It was Bentham who pointed out that Property is not in fact an object – as we are accustomed to think – but the relationship between the subject (individual or collective) and object (eg land, equipment, knowledge).
My approach is to use associative/mutual/reciprocal/consensual ‘partnership-based’ protocols – which the French distinguish as ‘contrats de société ‘ and which are commonplace East of Suez. These may be distinguished from the ‘Anglo’ approach of ‘one way’ contracts imposed by Statute (‘Law’) or judges (‘Equity’ or ‘Common Law’) and which the French distnguish as ‘contrats demandat’.
Through the use of a partnership protocol to encapsulate all of the property relationship – ie the rights of use, and the fruits of use (usufruct)- it is possible to arrive at a new settlement in respect of IP (and Real Property, as well as any other productive asset),I believe.
The outcome is an associative agreement – in respect of a productive asset in common ownership of a ‘custodian’ entity or foundation – which is both Closed, because only member subscribers may use it and Open, since anyone who consents to the agreement may subscribe.
This presentation of mine last year re community television and broadband is relevant.