Re: [ba-ohs-talk] Bootstrap and Licensing
James (and everybody else interested in DKR/OHS). (01)
I have not really followed the licencing discussion, so I hope I am not
off the beam here. But fastening on to what you said about the substance
for an OHS to operate on, Fleabyte is being developed to become a
_dynamic_ knowledge repository to be worked on (i.e. substance brought
closer to the frontiers) by means of an OHS. (02)
While the OHS is being promoted and developed, there are a number of
challenges facing us that we seek to overcome. One, of course, is
getting appropriate involvement to staff the "frontier outposts."
Another is to develop the contents page into a well-functioning
journaling system. (In the meantime, people are working on making more
accessible the body of Bootstrap discussion material that has been built
up over the years.) (03)
We hope that Fleabyte will develop into a sort of educational journalism
that takes scattered inputs from the world (raw or to some degree
refined) and gradually refines that into up-to-snuff handbooks. What is
perhaps different here from Doug's vision of handbooks is that the
material does not so much pertain to an organization (corporate,
governmental, or ngo), but to an "open" body that I perceive as a public
interested in furthering the common good - ref. top left of Fleabyte's
home page. (04)
A challenge for building and operating the relevant DKR is how to define
its boundaries of interest. A challenge for the relevant OHS is how to
select and allow parties - democratically! - to shape the content,
especially where it will be impinged on by ideologies. (05)
Will it bear fruit? Well, we have our doubters and we have our dream. (06)
Henry (07)
James Michael DuPont wrote: (08)
> > My arguments have always been predicated on the
> > problem of
> > funding people to build a thing that needs building.
> > How do you
> > do that? That's the only problem I have attempted to
> > solve.
>
> I have thought about this over the holidays have have
> come up with some good ideas.
>
> 1. An OHS is data intensive. In order to be usefull
> you need a large body of data so that you can usefully
> cross reference.
>
> 2. An application of the OHS does not need to be
> GPLed. The content of the system, the usage of the
> system, the running and the advertising system, all
> can be run for profit by a company. Look at mp3.com
> that uses linux/php/apache to run a non-free service.
>
> 3. Again, the content of the system is not affected by
> the license of the core code. You might want to
> provide a LGPL lib to allow for the creation of custom
> applications.
>
> 4. The hypertext and webservices world is not really
> covered by the GPL v2. There is no way to stop a user
> from using http to access all of your data and create
> a derived product without linking and without
> permission.
>
> 5. The SQL world is just the same, you can use the
> LGPL libraries to access a postgres database and do
> not need to make anything GPL.
>
> 6.As soon as a company decides to implement it
> internally, and not to distribute it outside, they can
> customise the code to thier hearts content and have no
> obligation to republish. A consulting company could do
> this customization for the and make money doing so.
>
> So there are still many ways (both good and bad) for
> creating non-free all-for-profit derived works using
> an OHS.
>
> I hope that you found that interesting.
> mike
>
> =====
> James Michael DuPont
>
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