20
The Battle for Open
- Sin of No Proof – when an environmental claim cannot be substantiated by easily accessible supporting information.
- Sin of Vagueness – making poorly defined or broad claims so that their real meaning is likely to be misunderstood by the consumer.
- Sin of Irrelevance – a claim that is truthful but is unimportant or unhelpful.
- Sin of Lesser of Two Evils – making claims that may be true within the product category, but that risk distracting the consumer from the greater environmental impacts of the category as a whole.
- Sin of Fibbing – making wholly false claims.
- Sin of Worshiping False Labels – when a product, through either words or images, gives the impression of third-party endorsement where no such endorsement actually exists.
In the IT world the similarities between greenwashing and claims to openness have led to the term ‘openwashing’ being used. Klint Finley explains (2011):
The old ‘open vs. proprietary’ debate is over and open won. As IT infrastructure moves to the cloud, openness is not just a priority for source code but for standards and APIs as well. Almost every vendor in the IT market now wants to position its products as ‘open.’ Vendors that don’t have an open source product instead emphasize having a product that uses ‘open standards’ or has an ‘open API.’
As companies adopt open credentials in education we are seeing the term applied in that sphere too, with similar cynicism (Wiley 2011a). Like ‘green’, there are a series of positive connotations
