a legal issue. It’s an engineering issue. I advocate Open Source, because very pragmatically, I think it leads to better engineering results and better economic results’ (Raymond 2002).
To non-developers this distinction often seems pedantic or obtuse. The two are generally clumped together, and indeed many open source advocates are passionate about freedoms also. It is worth noting the difference, however, as it has resonance with the motivations in open education. Openness in education can be seen as a practical approach; for instance, the learning object movement of the early 2000s often used the argument of efficiency, as we shall see in the next chapter. But the ‘social’ argument is also at the core of open education, making the outputs of publicly funded research available to all, rather than in proprietary databases.
The free and open source software movements can be seen as creating the context within which open education could flourish, partly by analogy, and partly by establishing a precedent. But there is also a very direct link. David Wiley (2008) reports how in 1998 he became interested in developing an open licence for educational content and contacted both Stallman and Raymond directly. Out of this came the open content licence, which he developed with publishers to establish the Open Publication Licence (OPL). This licence had two forms: form A, which prohibited the distribution of modified versions without the permission of the author; and form B, which prohibited the distribution of the book in paper form for commercial purposes. As Wiley comments, this naming convention wasn’t useful, as it didn’t tell you what the licence referred to, and similarly, the badges didn’t tell you which of the two had been selected. But it was adopted by O’Reilly press, and became the forerunner to a more widely adopted licence.
