Learning from RedMonk’s “open source” conundrum

Just chanced upon a wonderful post by Steve O’Grady of Redmonk. The post touches upon a subject near and dear to my heart and to those of many in the online bio community; licensing.

The background: RedMonk bills itself as an open source analyst firm, and has historically licensed content under a CC-NC-SA license. Well someone pointed out that the NC part of the license goes against the open source ethos. Hmmm, we have a problem here.

The solution: Dynamic licensing. The folks at RedMonk are now using a plugin changes the licensing as a function of time. When content is made available, it is available under a CC-NC-SA license, but after 60 days, automatically switches over to a CC-BY-SA license.

Now I am not saying we should specifically be using the licenses described here. The key is the problem, which is much the same that many content producers in the life sciences face today. The second key is the action. RedMonk had a problem and found a solution. A few people have said lately that we should stop talking and take action. We have journals that use CC licensing. We have wikis that do the same and many blogs. Science should be fundamentally open source. We have established that many kinds of raw data belong in the public domain, but there is a lot of generated information that belongs to the content producer. I think we have a blueprint here we should think about.