paradox Open Source / Open Content

[sandro_zic at web.de]

Hi all,

I'd like to ask for your comments and advice.

My name is Sandro Zic, core-developer of the oc4ware which is the software of 
some international Web-portals like the 'Open Community 4 Science' which will 
start on Monday (unfortunately, only in German up to now).

These portals will form a kind of content or knowledge network of free content. 
We basically adopted the idea of open source for all kinds of knowledge work 
like research and teaching at universities.

Our Software is currently GPL licensed and one could say, that the GPLs idea - 
as stated in the preamble - is right what we want on the level of Open Content or 
Open Knowledge, just replace 'software' with 'content' or 'publications':

"The licenses for most software are designed to take away your freedom 
to share and change it. By contrast, the GNU General Public License is 
intended to guarantee your freedom to share and change free software--to 
make sure the software is free for all its users."

Nevertheless, we encountered a paradox and thus think of moving away 
from the GPL as the software license of oc4ware. The problem is that if 
everyone has the possibility to run our software without any restrictions, 
he might jeopardize the idea of Open Content/Knowledge.

For example, a big commercial content provider could use our software 
to start a commercial content network, doing just the same things like our 
open content network does - except for the fact that users have to pay for 
accessing the publications offered.

This is the paradox: If the software is free to use for anyone and the idea 
and aim of our project is to provide the freedom to share and change 
content/knowledge of any kind - what if someone uses our software to 
restrict access to publications by offering them on a pay-for-view basis? 
This runs counter to the idea _why_ the software is programmed: freedom 
to share and change content/knowledge.

To solve this problem, we think about creating our own license, which is 
basically GPL, but with two additional points:

Anyone who uses our software for commercial purpose in the fields of 
science and education,
a) is obliged to offer the publications for free 9 months after they were 
published.
b) is obliged to keep his site (using our software) functioning to 
communicate with the central routing servers of our network which hold 
together the decentral repositories.

The rationale behind this is that our software can be used without any 
restrictions in all fields except science and education. There are no 
restrictions at all if the software is used for internal purposes (like 
company intranet education). But the commercial use is restricted, if 
publications are offered to the public, regarding the above mentioned 
points.

I hope, I made clear our problem and would very much appreciate any 
help. Maybe there's already been a discussion on such a topic (though I 
did not find any), maybe you got an idea how to solve the paradox, maybe 
a proper license already exists, or maybe there is no paradox at all ;)

Thanks in advance,


Sandro Zic | http://www.oc4home.org
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