Consilience

As some of you may know, I work for the University of Michigan Library where my title is Copyright Specialist. One of the projects I am most proud of is the change of the default Creative Commons license for content created by librarians and staff at MLibrary and posted online from CC:BY-NC to CC:BY, removing the non-commercial restriction. Why is this important? Well, see what I wrote on the MPublishing blog, copied below under the terms of the CC:BY 3.0 license :)

Back in October of 2008, MLibary became one of the first academic libraries to apply a Creative Commons license to its website content. At the time, the Library opted for the Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial (“CC BY NC”) license. More recently, on November 18th, 2010, the library changed the default Creative Commons license used for all content created by librarians and staff hosted on the library website to an Attribution-only (“CC BY”) license.

Why did we opt for a CC BY NC license initially then – after some experience – remove the non-commercial restriction? Greg Grossmeier, Copyright Specialist at MPublishing, explains how the Creative Commons License MLibrary chose enables content creation.

Why use a Creative Commons license at all?
Before we get into the reasons why MLibrary changed its license, it is important to review the types of uses we are hoping to encourage by using any Creative Commons license in the first place. In the most simple of terms, we hope to encourage adaptations and redistribution of our content.

First, we are delighted to see our work actually used, improved or incorporated into new resources. When other organizations reuse our work (for example, another institution using some of our libguides) we know that others appreciate our work and find it useful. Second, by using a Creative Commons license that allows derivatives we enable others to make translations of the work without the need to get prior permission. With our use of a Creative Commons license we enable others to make translations and redistribute them for even wider reuse of our work.

Why remove the NonCommercial restriction?
First, removing the NonCommercial restriction provides greater clarity for those wishing to reuse our content. The NonCommercial clause in the CC licenses does not fully define what a “commercial use“ is. Thus, an individual or organization wishing to use our work cannot always be certain that their use would be acceptable. If they are uncertain, the users or organizations will either contact MLibrary to ask for clarification/permission (something which we wanted to avoid by using a Creative Commons license in the first place) or they will elect to simply not use our material. Unfortunately, the second scenario is typical.

A report released by Creative Commons in 2009 found that content creators see more uses as noncommercial than do content reusers. This means that individuals and organizations tend to self-censor their reuses of a NC-licensed work because they erroneously believe that their use will be considered a commercial use, thus not permissible by the license.

The MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW) project uses a NonCommercial license from Creative Commons for their content. They elected to be explicit with their interpretation of what “non-commercial“ means. While this is very useful for users of MIT OCW materials it does not scale easily. This is because it is simply defining “non-commercial“ for MIT — and that definition might not be the same for all creators using NonCommercial licenses. Thus, it is not advisable for all creators using a NonCommercial license to write their own definition of “non-commercial.”

If 1000 people are asked to write their definition of “non-commercial” you will probably get 1000 different definitions. If all users of NonCommercial licenses produced their own definition of “non-commercial” then potential users will need to read that definition closely, and possibly ask for legal advice, each time they wish to reuse a work. Ironically, the more specific each content creator is about its particular view of ‘commercial’, the more confused and inconsistent the situation becomes. This confusion and inconsistency is the exact situation that Creative Commons aspires to eliminate.

Secondly, with the use of the Attribution-only license, the library is making a strong commitment to compatibility with other Freely and Openly licensed materials such as Wikipedia. If two licenses are incompatible with each other it means that content from one can not be incorporated into a work under the other. The NonCommercial clause is incompatible with many other open content licenses, including other Creative Commons licenses. In fact, it is only compatible with three out of the six Creative Commons licenses.

As the chart above shows, the most compatible license available (aside from waiving all copyrights) is the Attribution-only license. This allows others to reuse our content in the largest number of places and contexts including, importantly, the CC BY SA licensed Wikipedia.

By using the most compatible license available from Creative Commons, MLibrary enables efficient content creation. We make it possible for users to worry less about license incompatibility and permissions — and instead spend more time on the actual creation of quality content. We hope to see the positive influence of this throughout the local, national, and international library communities.

The above was originally posted on the MPublishing Blog under the title “MLibrary & Creative Commons: Commitment to Compatibility.” Reproduced under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license.

Its that time again! Time for another release of Ubuntu to hit the streets. This time our friend the Natty Narwhal will be making its debut the last week of April sometime on April 28th.

To celebrate we’ll be joining our energy with the already heavily attended event known simply as Penguicon. For those that do not yet know, Penguicon is a combination Free/Open Source conference plus Science Fiction convention. Not many other events can boast a past participant list that includes Cory Doctorow, Chris DiBona, Neil Gaiman, Jono Bacon, Jon “maddog” Hall, and Steve Jackson.

The Michigan LoCo release party will be taking place on Friday April 29th in the newly renovated hotel bar starting at 7pm. Come for the Ubuntu celebration but stay for the fun that is Penguicon.

Details:
When: Friday April 29th at 7pm
Where: Troy Marriott
Penguicon? http://www.penguicon.org
RSVP and Directions on the LoCo Directory Event Page.

We did it!

A great big thanks! goes out to all of the wonderful people who responded to the call to show their support and contribute to the Ubuntu Michigan LoCo’s sponsorship of a MUG meeting. We raised more than the amount needed before our deadline of May 1st. Thanks to the contributors the Michigan LoCo team will be donating $185 to MUG to support its efforts bringing high quality Free/Open Source and Linux-focused events in the South East Michigan area.

What next?
Next, the Michigan LoCo team will source a couple presentations from our group to give at a MUG meeting this summer. Let me know if you want to present on a topic! And of course, it is time for a huge influx of Michigan LoCo members at that meeting.

Thanks again to all of the contributors!

Last week I was interviewed (.mp3) for the very awesome, very fun Lococast hosted by the always enjoyable Rick Harding and Craig Maloney. We hit on many of my various interests including: copyright, open data, open educational resources (OERs), Creative Commons, community management, the Michigan LoCo team, and Ubuntu more generally,

It was great fun sitting down with Rick and Craig for about an hour; they always make it enjoyable.

[tl;dr: The Michigan LoCo team is going to sponsor a MUG meeting! Help us raise money by contributing to greg@grossmeier.net on Paypal!]

Background / About MUG
As many of you may know, one of the best linux related groups in Michigan is MUG, or Michigan!/usr/group. They hold monthly meetings in Southfield, Michigan. Many Ubuntu LoCo team members have been attending MUG meetings for a long time and I highly recommend checking them out if you have a chance. In fact at their last meeting, March 8th, our very own Craig Maloney (snapl on IRC) presented on how to create a podcast. As many of you know, Craig and Rick Harding are the co-hosts of the awesome Lococast. And the Ubuntu Michigan LoCo/MUG intermingling doesn’t stop there. Many other LoCo members have presented in the past include Jorge Castro, Rick, and myself.

MUG also brings in amazing out of town speakers and can do that because they help pay the travel costs as much as possible. The room they use for the meetings is also something they have to pay for each time. Thus, to put on such great events with such great content requires some money. This is why they have yearly membership dues of $35. I know that some LoCo members are also paying MUG members.

The Proposal
MUG has also recently started a new program where a business or group can sponsor a meeting.

Basically, what this means is that we could, as a group, raise the $150 to sponsor a MUG meeting where we could then have an Ubuntu-themed meeting and any member of the Michigan LoCo will be considered a full member for 2011.

Really, the best part is contributing to the success of MUG and having an Ubuntu-themed MUG meeting.

The How
Lets raise that required $150 as fast as we can! We’re already about half-way there, but the deadline is May 1st. I will be accepting contributions to my Paypal account (greg@grossmeier.net). When we hit $150 I’ll send a note to our team’s mailing list, my blog, and let the MUG Board know.

Also, in case anyone has any reservations about giving money to me to then give to MUG, I will log into my Paypal account for any LoCo member who attends a MUG meeting and show the contribution information.

The next part is the best: Our sponsored meeting.

Our Meeting
We shooting to have our sponsored meeting in either June or July. Since it’ll be Ubuntu-themed we should have one or two great Ubuntu-related talks. These can be anything from a how-to to a case study of your use of Ubuntu in some really interesting situation (run 1000 Ubuntu servers in a cluster? Tell us about it!).

Let me or the list know if you have a topic that you would like to present!

Questions?

Let me know if you have any questions about this fundraiser or MUG in general.

I had a great time at the Michigan LoCo team’s event for the Natty Ubuntu Global Jam. We had about 20 people show up, including the famous Jason Smith. We all gave Natty a spin, made things crash, reported bugs, triaged others, and gave user testing feedback (loosely).

Also, a big thanks to Ben Rousch for bringing the Founders, Arcadia, and New Holland beer from the west side of Michigan; we loves those breweries!

The rest of my photos, some from Jorge Castro, and more from Craig Maloney. If you were there and took photos, let me know!

I just sent out the email announcement to the relevant local mailing lists about the upcoming Ubuntu Global Jam for Natty Narwhal. Below is a copy of the announcement.

Ubuntu Global Jam for Ubuntu 11.04 – Natty Narwhal
April 3rd, 12noon – 5pm
SRT Solutions, 206 S. Fifth Ave in Ann Arbor
RSVP: http://loco.ubuntu.com/events/team/779/detail/

The next release of Ubuntu will be one of the most ambitious releases yet. By replacing the default interface with Unity, changing to the newly released LibreOffice Suite, and upgrading the default python version to 2.7, this version of Ubuntu promises to be a spectacular upgrade.

Because of all these major overhauls, it is important to get as many people as possible testing, reporting bugs, triaging, and bug fixing before final release day. Come to the Michigan LoCo’s Ubuntu Global Jam to help ensure this release is the best it can be.

We will be doing test installs and upgrades, hardware compatibility checking, along with some bug reporting and triaging. No prior experience is required; we’ll be working together and in teams to help get everyone up to speed and contributing.

Bring your laptop(s), netbook(s), and USB disks for test installs. Snacks will be provided.

If you can, stay after the Jam for some post-event revelry at a local establishment (location TBD).

Today Jono, as well as Gabriel, announced that the new deal for the Banshee developers regarding the referral money would be a 75/25 split. To show good faith, Canonical will also be donating 25 percent of the proceeds from the UbuntuOne Music Store. As could be predicted, there was a lot of commentary about the relative merits of this outcome. Here are my thoughts on those comments.

A choice withdrawn
First, Gabriel’s blog post. As you can read from the language Gabriel uses, this was a one-sided decision where Canonical withdrew their previous offer. Reminder: that was where they gave the Banshee maintainers a choice between on by default and a 75/25 split and a not on by default and 100% GNOME Foundation. The maintainers choose the second. Some may say “but Canonical is now offering 25% of U1 Music Store revenue, which is more than they offered before.” Yes, that is true, but the Banshee maintainers specifically did not choose a revenue sharing deal. To then respond with a statement that their previous offer was a “mistake” and that this new plan devised by Canonical is the way they are going to go, nevermind the decision previously made, is bad form.

Money supports FLOSS development
This next part surprised me. And I have to preface this with that I respect [openly ;)] the work that Jono does for the Ubuntu community. The Ubuntu community is lucky it has such a devoted person working on their behalf. I’ve always been impressed with the quality of team leadership/management I have seen from Jono. But, his comments on Twitter following this announcement did not reflect the Jono I know.

Jef Spaleta asked if Jono could see the difference between legal and ethical (we all know it is permitted by Banshee’s license to change the source code, and thus the referral code, but ethics are separate from legalness). Jono responded with “my view is that it is all going to FLOSS, so it is fine.” Sandy Armstrong correctly pointed out that Canonical does not only do FLOSS development. They also produce Landscape and UbuntuOne, where the bulk of the code (my guess), the server/web interface portion, is proprietary. Jono ignored his previous statement and responded with “that’s why I said ‘most.’” Sandy correctly pointed out that he indeed said “all.”

Yes, that whole previous paragraph of “he said/she said” was only to point out, in exruciating detail, that Jono slipped up on his wording in a tweet – something I’m sure none of us have ever done. But this is a very delicate matter and should be handle accordingly.

So, it was especially disappointing to see that slip-up followed by another sloppy post: If Canonical put 100% of the money into non-Free software then he’d see the problem, suggesting that anything less that 100% is just fine.

Then his last comment (on Twitter) about the issue for the day suggested that if the Banshee maintainers didn’t want their referral code to be changed they should have licensed their app that way. This is either a suggestion to create a non-Free software license or a statement that “as long as it is legal it should be OK with everyone.” The first is just ridiculous. And the second exemplifies the world where ethics do not enter a decision making process. Something can be both legal and unethical.

Transparency
(I’m making this a separate section because I want to bring attention to the idea, and I hope it happens.) One of the suggestions by Jef was to open up the financials of Canonical to prove where the money is going. I’m a huge fan in open book financials for companies I support. The Wikimedia Foundation does this, along with Creative Commons (PDF). They are non-profits in the US and make their 990 tax fillings public. Bradley Kuhn has even started a gitorious project collection those fillings for various FLOSS non-profits.

Aaron Bockover, another Banshee maintainer, wrote an open letter to Canonical suggesting another route. Basically, let the banshee.fm server handle the revenue sharing/affiliate code managing. This not only allows a more transparent audit trail but also has many technical benefits. I’ll let you read them on his post. They are very sound and well thought out.

The decision process
This kerfuffle brings one very important part of the Ubuntu project to the fore: the governance and decision making process. Reminder, the decision to switch the default media player from Rhythmbox to Banshee was a community decision at an Ubuntu Developer Summit. This was a community-led decision. This is in stark contrast to some other decisions in the Ubuntu project that are not made by the community, an example of which is, of course, this revenue sharing decision, and another is the changes made by the design team, Ayatana.

Because of today’s developments, I decided to relisten to this interview with Phillip Schmidt (of P2PU) and Mako on my walk home from work. The interview was about, generally, governance in Free and Open projects. Obviously, much of the interivew focuses on Debian and Ubuntu governance. I HIGHLY recommend listening to that interview if you are at all interested in the governance structue of Ubuntu, Debian, Wikipedia, etc. Mako’s insights into those communities, especially Ubuntu’s, is greatly worthwhile. One thing of note is the way decisions are made regarding Ubuntu. Mako brings up the point about recent changes made by the Ayatana team and how they are presented to both the community (including the Community Council) as done deals with recommendations to “keep people on message” if they disagree with the changes.

I wanted to bring this governance aspect up because I think it really gets to the core of the issue for me. This decision was made by people not accountable to the community. The relative merits of an organization running a FLOSS project that has people and decisions that are not accountable to the community is up for debate, but not here. I’m just noting it and saying that it is something to be extremely aware of. The conclusion you make about its morality is your own. I might write more on it later, but this post is already getting to be too long.

My Opinion
My opinion is simple: This decision was made in a very bad way. No community involvement without any course for a real dialog. It disappointed me.

It reminds me, all too clearly, of the decision to name the file sync cloud service UbuntuOne instead of CanonicalOne (or similar). Some of you might remember the intense debate that happened on the topic. I watched the Community Council meeting where Mako and others talked with Mark about not only the name but also the issue that UbuntuOne was, and is, not a Free Network Service. I remember the conversation not being a true discussion with open minds. The decision had been made by Canonical people (including sabdfl) and no amount of discourse from the Council could change that. It disappointed me.

In addition, the communication of this decision was made poorly. Things could have been said better on Twitter. Things could have been more openly discussed on mailing lists. But none of those open channels of communication were used effectilvely (if at all). That disappointed me.

So I guess that’s my opinion of the matter: I’m disappointed.

–

This post has agonized me the entire time I wrote it. I don’t like these posts, but I feel they need to be written from time to time. I don’t mean to offend anyone, I only mean to share my thoughts on an important issue. I could have written more, because this kerfuffle brought up some problems that will need to be solved to prevent future kerfuffles. I didn’t write more because those issues deserve their own post and it is getting late.

As many of you may know, I’m really quite facinated by my email system. By system I mean the suite of tools that bring email sent to me to my eyes. I’ve written before on my setup (note: that is out of date now) and its migration across systems. As you can see, I’m a fan of Mutt.

I do have a confession. For the last few months (since mid-December ’10) I was using Thunderbird 3.3a2. Why? Why throw away all that time and effort setting up Mutt/Offlineimap/Imapfilter to be as effecient as possible and just go with TBird? Search across accounts.

Yes, search.

Ever since I started using Mutt I found myself sometimes popping into my gmail account to search for a specific message (if it was sent to that account, of course. My personal account is not hosted by gmail, just my work account). I felt bad about it each time. “Why can’t I just do this in Mutt?” I would ask myself. I tried various email searching systems but none of the quite worked exactly how it should/I wanted.

Then came Notmuch.

Notmuch promised to be exactly what I wanted. A text-based, threaded, and search-oriented mail reader. Perfect! Except, due to some limitations at the beginning (basically, you can’t move messages without making Notmuch angry) I never could use it full time.

But the Notmuch developers fixed that! I didn’t know that though. I missed that announcement. Where was it? Why wasn’t it being shouted on the roof tops? NOTMUCH CAN NOW SYNC WITH IMAP CHANGES!

Oh well.

This whole time I’ve been using Thunderbird (mostly) without issue and loving the ability I had to search across all 3 of my email accounts which something that even GMail, the master of search, could never do for me.

So what brought me back to Mutt from Thunderbird 3.3? Search. You see, just like Lucas I saw Zack post about how a long flight gave him the time to integrate Notmuch and Mutt.

Now, thanks to notmuch, I can do a quick search across all 3 of my mail accounts and even recreate threads from just a single message. Simply amazing.

Do you like Mutt and wish you had top-notch search? Give mutt+notmuch a try!

Tonight I gave a presentation to the wonderful University of Michigan Wikipedians student group on copyright.

I pretty much threw this presentation together at the last minute (started around 5pm, the presentation was at 7, I also ate dinner during that time) but I think it went ok. However, I know it could be better and it could address more topics more clearly. Mike Linksvayer has even already given me some very valuable feedback on identi.ca.

Do you have any feedback? Any recommendations on how to better phrase something? Any other points specific to Wikipedia that I didn’t remember to talk about?