Slideshare is telling me this has been removed. Is there a corrected URL that I'm missing? - Jill O'Neill

Many thanks! That one worked. And now having flipped through it, may I say Cameron that I think the presentation is brilliant and what members of the information community need to hear and have spelled out to them. - Jill O'Neill

Sorry - the wireless was dodgy and I kept being told it hadn't uploaded so ended up with two...so deleted one. Sorry for confusion! - Cameron Neylon

We seem to be up for the livecast but you won't be able to see the slides there, so click along at slideshare... - Cameron Neylon

Thanks for sharing ! - joergkurtwegner

it's here: http://www.slideshare.net/Cameron... - John Dupuis

and the livecast here:- http://friendfeed.com/e... - Graham Steel

I like this a lot - very practical as opposed to some often very optimistic theories (particularly from science social nets) about how just by using web tools all kinds of community / long tail magic happens. - Richard Akerman

Richard, I had exactly the same impression. Also, we have much more experience of what may or may not work. - Pawel Szczesny

Looks great! On one slide it says, "share alike is bad" or something like that. Are you talking just for data? Or licensing in general (photos, slideshows, etc.) - Steve Koch

Steve, I am gradually coming to the opinion that it is essentially generally bad unless we can find a way of building in a concept of a universal licence which seems legally intractable. It just about works for code because code gets used for other code. Anything else you are likely to want to mix and remix into new types of work. Combine a database with a picture with a dataset with a...if they are all share-alike which licence should you use? - Cameron Neylon

The essential problem is that you will scare away the people who play nice because they are not sure what to do, and the people who you want the license for, to make it enforceable, are going to ignore it and steal anyway. Then what do you do? Much better to do the share-alike pressure as a community thing rather than a license IMO. But I know that is a controversial view. Have a blog post simmering on the subject... - Cameron Neylon

@Steve: some of the links in this post (http://www.sennoma.net/main...) may be of interest to you. - Bill Hooker

Nice slideshow, Cameron. - Maxine

Thanks Maxine. I should point out, as it is not obvious from the slides, that most of the comments I made in the talk about Tim O'Reilly's design principles are actually exactly what he said in his original article. Just that people have remembered the soundbites and not what he was saying. - Cameron Neylon

I got some video of the talk recorded which is at http://mogulus.com/cameron.... Wireless dropped out at some point and I haven't had a chance to check how much of the talk I got. Go to Video on Demand -> eSI meeting on Web2 . Proper video was recorded and will be online at some point. - Cameron Neylon

Cameron, you may wish to correct the link of the entry by visiting the FriendFeed web interface, going to this entry, clicking "More (down arrow)", and selecting "Edit this entry". - Chris Lasher

@Cameron: that makes a lot of sense. I'm sure if I hear the counter arguments they will make a lot of sense too. It would be nice if you could license stuff as "attribution share-alike" + "just be reasonable and use this however you want. I only have a legal license on this stuff in case someone tries to sue me later to stop me from using derivatives of my own work." - Steve Koch

I agree that the community enforcing share-alike is by and large the way to go. And 99.99% of the time it's not going to be worth enforcing the license in a costly legal manner. But I wouldn't be surprised if eventually there was something that was important enough that the cost of a legal battle would be worth it. Then, having the proper licensing would be essential? - Steve Koch

Chris, good point, just fixed it. had very vague wireless the last few days. - Cameron Neylon

Proper "licensing" is definitely essential but my belief is that the best approach is an explicit dedication to the public domain either via Public Domain Dedication License or cc0. That way no-one can ever stop you using it and you don't block anyone else from doing anything else with it. The catch is that you are giving up control and that worries some people - Cameron Neylon

I created a survey and would appreciate, if you could take it - http://tinyurl.com/opencollab - joergkurtwegner

Mmmhh, I get more and more the impression that 'open ...' advocates are more sitting in academia, than in industry? Is that true? - joergkurtwegner

Joerg, hasn't that always been the case? - Deepak Singh

I would assume that would be the case. Though I would guess it depends on which discipline you are talking about and how you define industry. - Cameron Neylon

@Deepak - True, and I am (still) totally believing in 'open ...' principles if it comes down to creativity, but I am also respecting legal principles. In other words, if we have both aspects, how many examples do exist for a 'working' relationship between both? I think people are interested, but where are the positive and negative examples? - joergkurtwegner

@Cameron - Industry - here, as example - an entity, which requires patents to pay its employees and very expensive clinical studies. - joergkurtwegner

Joerg, the problem is that in the sciences, at least if one takes industry/academic partnerships, there are very few examples of success or failure. It's an area that's just not been explored much. The usual flow is very much linear. Can be developed in academia, is then licensed via tech transfer. - Deepak Singh

Any entity that requires patents to pay its employees by definition can't be open. That is really the central problem. Being open requires disclosure, public disclosure rules out patents (I've never actually understood why that rule was required by the way - it seems to be the source of the problem). The question is whether a business can make money by a route that doesn't involve patents (or copyright). There are examples of that, O'Reilly publishing being the most obvious but they are pretty thin - Cameron Neylon

Google (they own very few patents) is another. Their core business is not driven by patents either. - Deepak Singh

Cameron, I think it would more fair to say that many companies require a key component to be protected by IP. But that does not mean that it is not advantageous to pool shared resources openly with competitors (and the world). For example, companies need to protect their drugs but do they have to keep solubility of starting materials secret? - Jean-Claude Bradley

All of that is true, I just wanted to make the very narrow point, that if a company is dependent on patents to stay afloat, ie that the IP is the core income stream then they can't make that open. I agree that it will be feasible to start with "non-competitive" information - the problem then becomes defining what is non-competitive. The solubility data may not be but GSK may not want Pfizer to know that they were/are working on compound X or series Y. - Cameron Neylon

O.k., I think in mass markets like Google, OpenOffice, and MySQL the open principle might work, but the more specialized an area gets, the more closed it needs to be. Actually, this is pretty bad news for people in drug design, because the legal system leaves us with zero/one decisions of sharing information openly. Anything in-between zero and one is covered by heavy-weight legal authorities, and fast and fully rational decision making is different. This might be one explanation why big pharma exists? - joergkurtwegner

There is an alternative argument which is that the smaller you are and the more specialised the area the more you can potentially benefit from being open as long as you are offering something that is time bounded and urgent (support, delivery) or requires access to a limited resource. But it is real hard to see how you can make this work for research and development on a commercial standing. Delivering on R&D is always the problem... - Cameron Neylon

Though I am not fond of metrics measuring creativity, they clearly have some value if money is involved, though you can easily create artificial revenue constructs causing problems, e.g. global warming, or a bank crisis. Anyway, maybe research could use this for some parts, I like statistics and the outliers (black swans) coming with it - http://dx.doi.org/10... - joergkurtwegner

@Bill, sorry for the late reply. Thanks for posting those links on your blog. I did read through them. I find it so frustrating to think about! I have been using "copyleft" on my photos and blog posts, thinking it was the "right" or "recommended" thing to do. Now I'm hearing "public domain" from so many people who've thought about it. I guess what I'm going to do is leave the attribution share-alike licenses on for now and I can always change them to PD in a few months, right? - Steve Koch

(deleting comment on wrong thread) - Steve Koch

@Steve: as far as I know you can switch to Pub Dom whenever you want to. If you're thinking more about data then PDDL might suit you (http://www.opendatacommons.org/license...), otherwise for "content" in general I use CCZero. - Bill Hooker

Thanks, Bill. - Steve Koch

@steve there is no "right" but evolving best practice which we are definitely still not clear on. cc0 or PDDL is the simplest "nuclear" option which can be applied to more or less anything with reasonable confidence. CC-BY is probably most appropriate for writing and images but isn't really appropriate for data or code. At the end of the day a simple statement in English of what you feel is reasonable use is likely to be best coupled with a "licence" you are comfortable with. - Cameron Neylon

at the end of the day the bad guys will ignore the terms anyway whether they are legal or social - Cameron Neylon

thanks for sharing such presentation. - Alp

Just got an email from the nice people at ReDReSS (http://redress.lancs.ac.uk/ ) that there is a multimedia version of the talk up at http://redress.lancs.ac.uk/resourc... tle=web2&resolution=1024x768&speed=LAN with video and slides synched if people are interested. - Cameron Neylon