A Free, Libre and Open Glossary

Permissive works do not require adaptations to be released under a particular licence. Rarely, the term copyfree is used instead.

For example, if you turned Big Buck Bunny (a Creative Commons Attribution movie) into a video clip for a song, you wouldn’t need to apply any licence. It could legally remain all rights reserved.

A subset of permissive works are works without any copyright restrictions, such as works that are in the public domain in every country. There are also licences, like the “Give It Your Own License, License”, which remove all copyright restrictions.

When a copyleft work is adapted the adaptation must be released under the same or similar FLO licence as the original. For example, if I translated a Wikipedia article (under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike licence) into Esperanto, the translation would have to be licensed under that licence too. 

Reciprocal and viral are sometimes used as synonyms for copyleft. However, copyleft does not act like a virus. As Richard Stallman says: “A spider plant is a more accurate comparison; it [grows in] another place if you actively take a cutting”.

Share-alike is broader than copyleft: it includes copyleft, but also non-FLO licences that have a similar condition. (http://robmyers.org/2008/02/24/noncommercial-sharealike-is-not-copyleft/)

A piece of legislation could grant permissions outside of normal copyright law. The most obvious example is the public domain, which describes works outside of the area of copyright restrictions. 

For a work to qualify as FLO, it must be usable by any person. Works that are in the public domain in only some countries will not qualify.

There are hundreds of FLO licences. The benefits of such licences are that they are ideally unambiguous and they apply in all jurisdictions.

Some people simply express their intention that a work is free from some or all copyright restrictions. They may not be interested in applying a licence or may reject legalistic culture altogether.

A modern example is Nina Paley’s Copyheart: “Copying is an act of love. Please copy.” (http://copyheart.org/)

These declarations are dangerous because their legal status is unclear. Can it be reneged upon later (perhaps by inheritors)? Folk musician Woodie Guthrie included a notice on his recordings: “This song is Copyrighted in U.S. … and anybody caught singin it without our permission, will be mighty good friends of ourn, cause we don’t give a dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that’s all we wanted to do”.

A number of organisations still claim copyright over Guthrie’s songs.

F/OSS (free/open source software) or FLOSS (free, libre and open source software) draw on three terms for FLO software:

Software libre/libre software: A synonym for free software that emphasises freedom over openness, but avoids the gratis‒libre ambiguity.

Open source software: A synonym for free software that avoids the gratis‒libre ambiguity but removes the emphasis on rights and freedoms (see “The free/open divide” below).

Free software: The original term for FLO software. Not to be confused with freeware, which describes software that is free of charge.

Free cultural works: Free cultural works are those that are under a free cultural licence and that meet these further requirements:

It is possible for a work to be under a FLO licence but not meet these further requirements. For example, a song under a FLO licence only available for download in the proprietary MP3 format would not qualify (as soon as someone downloaded it and converted it to the free file format OGG, it would become a free cultural work, however). Nor would Fantastique Unfettered, which is under a FLO licence but only available in hardcopy.

Free content: A generic term for a free cultural work. 

Open knowledge: Open knowledge describes content and data that is under an open knowledge licence and that meets the further requirements of open knowledge as described in the Open Definition. Significantly:

As with free cultural works, it is possible for a work to be under a FLO licence but not meet these further requirements.

Interestingly, it is possible for a work to qualify as a free cultural work but not as open knowledge, and vice versa. Open knowledge does not need to be available in a free file format; free cultural works do. Open knowledge needs to be available for no more than reasonable reproduction cost; for free cultural works, only the ‘source data’ must be available. 

Open data: Open data is a form of open knowledge. 

Open content: Open content has been used in two senses. 

Open knowledge that is not data. This is the definition used by the Open Knowledge Foundation. Under this definition, open content is FLO. 

Works that are under fewer copyright restrictions than standard copyright law allows. In this definition, openness is a continuum: a work is more open than others if it allows reuse, revision, remixing and redistribution. This the definition used by David Wiley. 

This glossary uses the former definition. The latter definition does not clearly delimit works (the removal of a single copyright restriction qualifies, as does the removal of all restrictions). In addition, the former definition matches open source, whereas the latter is much broader.

Free file format: A free file format is publicly available in its entirety and not encumbered by copyright, patent, trade mark or other legal restrictions. Defined by LINFO.

Open format: According to LINFO, an open format is publicly available but may be encumbered by legal restrictions. My preference would be to use “free file format” and “open file format” as synonyms, and describe publicly available formats as “public file formats”.

Free/libre protocols and open standards: For a definition of open standards, see Krechmer's definitive work: http://www.csrstds.com/openstds.html

Open source hardware/open hardware: Open source hardware describes physical technology that is under FLO licences or free from patent restrictions, as appropriate. FLO licences usually only concern copyright law, not patent law, but hardware could infringe both copyright and patent law.

When a creator applies a public copyright licence to their works, they are removing restrictions on other people. They are not restricting themselves—or anyone that they contract with—in any way. For example, an author who uses the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial licence can still reproduce it for commercial purposes themselves, or give permission to others to reproduce it commercially.

Copyright law grants copyright holders the power to restrict other people’s use of their work or grant permissions to other people. A licence works within copyright law: the copyright holder is exercising their power to grant permissions.

Red Hat and their community website opensource.com coined the term “open source way” to describe a pro-sharing, pro-collaborative, pro-transparency, pro-accessibility, ethical approach.

This describes a broad philosophy inspired by the crowdsourced method by which much open source software is developed.

Further reading:

The Open Source Way, Red Hat: http://www.theopensourceway.org/book/index.html

Open government (also called open governance) is the notion that citizens should have access to the documents of government: the text of statutes, the reasons for decisions, internal reports, and so on.

Relationship to FLO: As long as the works are readily accessible, they may remain non-FLO. They do not even need to be open access or gratis: information that is available for a nominal fee or available in libraries but not online can still enable open government.

Open marketing describes totally transparent marketing by a company or project, to the extent possible in law.

Not to be confused with:

Other terms for “open”, some of which—like open government—are also concerned with transparency.

Crowdsourcing (a portmanteau of “outsourcing to the crowd”) is the process of obtaining content, goods or services by putting out a call to the community at large rather than assigning the task to a specific person. The term was coined in 2005 by two editors at Wired Magazine.

Sometimes, crowdsourcing is cooperative. For example, Wikipedia is a crowdsourced encyclopedia where people—on their own initiative—write and edit articles. However, it can also be competitive, such as a company that awarded a prize to whomever created the best logo.

Crowdsourcing is often used more narrowly than this, to refer specifically to a project that uses ‘the crowd' to provide data. For example, asking people around the world to record the daily temperature or test radiation levels. 

Crowdfunding also depends on the crowd, but in this case it is money that is solicited rather than labour. 

Examples include:

Zooniverse, where members of the general public contribute to scientific research by doing low-skill, low-commitment tasks that are beyond the ability of a computer. https://www.zooniverse.org/

TopCoder, where almost 500,000 members complete atomised tasks for small rewards, with the accumulative result being a solution to the problem. http://www.topcoder.com/whatiseoi/

Significantly, neither of these communities are FLO.

See the Wikipedia article on this topic for many examples: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crowdsourcing

Not be be confused with open source

The term open source is often misused to describe crowdsourcing instead. One reason for this may be the term “source”. In open source software, it refers to the source code that makes up the program. But source is also used as a verb, to acquire something. The confusion is exacerbated because open source lends itself to being crowdsourced. There are a few reasons for this:

However, there is no need for open source to be crowdsourced, and non-FLO content can be crowdsourced. Open source software can be developed in house with no input from the community (the community could fork the code, but the software itself is not crowdsourced).

There are a number of terms that confuse crowdsourcing with open source. Examples include:

Open source governance: This model of governance gives ordinary citizens the power to draft policy and directly affect the government.

Open source journalism: Originally, crowdsourced or participatory journalism. Increasingly used to describe participatory, transparent or FLO journalism.

Open source intelligence: Intelligence collected from public sources.

Crowdfunding (also called crowd financing and crowdsourced fundraising) is the financing of a project through the contributions (typically small) of many individuals. An example is IndieGoGo.

Relationship to FLO: While some FLO projects are crowdfunded, many are financed through traditional methods (or not at all).

When a good or service is available on a pay-what-you-want basis, the customer decides how much to pay. Sometimes, a floor or ceiling price is in place, or perks may encourage payments at particular levels.

Some FLO projects use a pay-what-you-want system. An example is the Commonly Open Bundle. People who contributed any amount of money received a download link with the assets. This also had a ransom element—because the bundle raised $10,000, the assets are licensed under Creative Commons Zero. 

Donations are not really pay-what-you-want, because there is no good or service to be exchanged. The donation isn’t required to access the work.

Shareware describes software provided on a limited basis; the user must pay to access the unencumbered product. The name is deceptive. 

Not to be confused with: 

Fund and release describes a family of methods of financing works. The common feature is that the creator or copyright holder (or potential creator, if the work does not yet exist) promises to release a work to the public if he or she receives a set amount of money. This money is either held in escrow or only pledged. 

In the threshold pledge system, the money is only released to the creator after the entire sum has been pledged. This is a way of guaranteeing to each donor that they will only be charged if enough money is raised for the work to be publicly released. Kickstarter uses the threshold pledge system, both for FLO and non-FLO works. 

The street performer protocol, on the other hand, only delivers the money to the creator upon delivery of the work. This is a way of guaranteeing that the creator does not cut and run with the money. While the authors who coined this term described the release of public domain works as an application of the protocol, the protocol could also be applied to proprietary works.

Where the fund and release model is used to release FLO works, it could be described as a “copyright buy-out”. 

Further reading:

“Electronic Commerce and the Street Performer Protocol”, Kelsey and Schneier: http://www.schneier.com/paper-street-performer.pdf

“Declared Value System”, Karl Fogel: http://falkvinge.net/2012/12/10/declared-value-system/

In the area of copyright, a ‘proprietary’ work is one that is not FLO. There is proprietary shareable content as well as FLO shareable content; non-shareable content is always proprietary.

As discussed above, the term “free” in “free, libre and open” means “free from restrictions”, not “free of charge”. The term “freeware” refers to software that is distributed for no cost. “Gratis” is a broader term that refers to anything distributed for no cost.

See also:

The euphemistically named Digital Rights Management (also called Digital Restrictions Management) describes methods of controlling how recipients and customers use products after distribution or sale. For example, a single-player computer game that only runs when you are connected to the Internet or an ebook that cannot be transferred from your old ebook reader to your new one. 

Some FLO licences forbid technical restrictions being placed on the work, which includes DRM. Remember, this does not restrict the copyright holder from distributing the work under DRM, only others who want to take advantage of the FLO licence to distribute the work.  However, even if a work is under a FLO licence, if the work is only available under DRM it will not qualify as a free cultural work or open knowledge.

There are two competing definitions of open access:

The broader one: an open access work is a scholarly book or article that is available online for any person to access without charge.

The narrow definition of open access, established at the Budapest Open Access Initiative: an open access work is one that is available online for any person to access, distribute or use in any other way without financial, legal or technical barriers and with no constraints except those of the integrity of the work and attribution. 

The latter definition effectively requires that open access works be FLO. Unfortunately, the former definition has gained widespread acceptance, and it is the one used throughout this glossary. 

“Gratis open access” refers to baseline open access. “Libre open access” has been used to refer to open access works that have fewer copyright restrictions. Note that this is a loose use of “libre”: a work that could only be shared noncommercially or verbatim would be “libre open access” even though it is not libre by standard usage.

“ Green open access ” describes a work that has been self-archived by the author in a repository or on a website, after having been published in the traditional way. “Gold open access” describes a work that is immediately made available by its publisher.

Relationship to FLO: Open access works are not necessarily FLO. They can be all rights reserved. While many FLO works are open access, not all of them are. For example, the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike periodical Fantastique Unfettered is FLO, but not available online or for no charge. 

Microsoft used the term ‘shared source’ to describe software code that it made available online for people to read and reference. Some shared source remained all rights reserved; other code was released under FLO licences. The term could be used more broadly to describe any source code that has been made readily available to read and reference, but not necessarily to duplicate or change. 

Shared source should not be confused with open source. Almost all open source is shared source, but open source software is also free from many copyright restrictions. In addition, a program under an open source licence, with source code that is accessible from within the program but not available online would qualify as open source but not shared source. 

Shared source is similar to gratis open access, except that it refers to software rather than scholarly works. 

Not to be confused with: 

Open design describes the creation of machines and other physical objects through publicly-shared information. It is unclear to me whether that information must also be FLO licensed.

Open educational resources are poorly defined. At their most narrow, such as the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation definition, they are “resid[ing] in the public domain or [...] released under an intellectual property license that permits their free use or re-purposing by others”. Under this definition, all OER must be FLO. 

The broader definitions simply require that OER be available at no cost for use and re-use. This includes FLO, but also includes works under Creative Commons licences with the NonCommercial terms, for example.

Open gaming describes tabletop gaming resources under either (a) FLO licences or (b) public copyright licences. Ryan Darcey, who coined the term, described open gaming licences as allowing commercial use. However, the Open Game License itself—while allowing commercial use—has other restrictions which may make it non-FLO.

An open patent is a patent that, when used, stops the user from exploiting their own patents in that particular field. As such, it bears similarities to the reciprocal nature of copyleft, but concerns a different area of the law.