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A_FLO_Glossary A FREE, LIBRE AND OPEN GLOSSARY

Copyright 2013 Chris Sakkas <mailto:sanglorian@gmail.com>

Written with help from friends in the free culture and open knowledge communities.

This is a living document. To read Release One, visit this post on the Living Libre website: 

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/.

A note on spelling: this work uses Australian spelling, so ‘licence’ is the noun and ‘to license’ is the verb. However, proper nouns—like the GNU General Public License—have not had their spelling altered. 

One Page Summary
What FLO is:
The words 'free', 'libre' and 'open', or the acronym that combines them, 'FLO', describe works that can be shared and adapted by any person for any purpose without infringing copyright law. A few restrictions on this sharing are acceptable, most significantly requirements that the original creator is credited or that derivative works are released under the same licence as the original ('share-alike'). 

What FLO might be:

What FLO isn’t:

Free, libre and open (FLO)
The words ‘free’, ‘libre’ and ‘open’ are used synonymously or together (F/O or FLO) to describe works that can be shared and adapted by any person for any purpose without infringing copyright law. There may be conditions to this use attached, if those conditions do not limit how the work can be shared and adapted or who it can be shared and adapted by. 

This fairly simple definition is complicated by the number of terms that describe the same or slightly different concept: free software, open source software, open content and free cultural works are a few examples. In some cases, these terms are more restrictive: a work can be under a FLO licence but not qualify as a free cultural work or open knowledge, for example. However, most of the terms describe the same works (free software and open source software) or distinguish between types of FLO work (open data and open source software), not what freedoms are granted for that work. 

A non-FLO work (called a ‘proprietary work’ outside of this document) is one that does not satisfy this definition. This includes works that grant some freedoms, but not sufficient ones. For example, a work under a Creative Commons licence with the NonCommercial terms is non-FLO even though it is more free than an all rights reserved work. Compare a convict in solitary confinement with one in a minimum security prison: one is more free than the other, but neither is free.

Free as in speech, not free as in beer
Because the word ‘free’ in English means both ‘no cost’ and ‘without restrictions’, there is the potential for confusion about the term 'free'. In this article, it is meant in the sense of 'freedom', not 'free of charge'.  

The community has borrowed the words gratis and libre from the Romance languages to distinguish between these two concepts. Libre is a synonym for 'free as in freedom'. ‘Gratis’ describes anything that is available free of charge.

A good illustration of this is Wikipedia’s tag line, ‘The Free Encyclopedia’. In Spanish, it is ‘La enciclopedia libre’. In other words, Wikipedia is free from restrictions. If it cost hundreds of dollars to access, it would still be ‘free’, it just wouldn’t be gratis.

The heading comes from a quote by Richard Stallman.

Permissive and copyleft: the two forms of FLO
Permissive
Permissive works do not require adaptations to be released under a particular licence. Rarely, the term ‘copyfree’ is used instead. 

For example, if you turned Big Buck Bunny (a Creative Commons Attribution movie) into a video clip for a song, you wouldn’t need to apply any licence to the video clip. It could legally remain all rights reserved. 

No restrictions
A subset of permissive works are works without any copyright restrictions. Works that are in the public domain in every country are a good example. There are also licences, like the COPYPASTE License and the Give It Your Own License, License which remove all copyright restrictions from a work. 

Some people split permissive licences with some requirements from permissive licences with no requirements. An example is Chris Sakkas' own site, the FOSsil Bank, which has separate entries for ‘Public domain’ and ‘Permissive’ licences.

Copyleft
Unlike works under permissive licences, when a copyleft work is adapted the adaptation must be released under the same FLO licence as the original (very rarely, the licence allows for adaptations to be released under a similar licence). 

For example, Wikipedia is under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike licence. If I translated a Wikipedia article into Esperanto, the translation would have to be licensed under that licence too. 

The terms ‘reciprocal’ and ‘viral’ are sometimes used as synonyms for copyleft. However, the term ‘viral’ is not an accurate description of how copyleft works and is used to spread fear, uncertainty and doubt. Copyleft works only affect derivatives. As Richard Stallman, the creator of the copyleft concept says: it is more like a spider plant; cut some off and put it elsewhere, it will grow there as well.

The term ‘share-alike’ is broader than copyleft: it includes copyleft, but also non-FLO licences that require adaptations to be released under the same licence as the original. 

Making works FLO
There are three ways that a work might become FLO.

Statute
A piece of legislation could grant permissions outside of normal copyright law. The most obvious example is the public domain, which describes works outside of the area of copyright restrictions. 

Keep in mind that for a work to qualify as FLO, it must be usable by any person. Therefore, a work that is in the public domain in only some countries will not qualify. 

Licence
There are hundreds of FLO licences. The benefits of such licences are that they are ideally unambiguous and they apply in all jurisdictions. FLO licences are a form of public copyright licence. 

Declaration
Rather than apply a legal licence, some people simply express their intention that a work is free from some or all copyright restrictions. They may do this because they are not interested in applying a licence (or are not aware that they exist), or because they reject legalistic culture or copyright law altogether and would prefer to avoid using a licence (which depends on copyright law for its efficacy). 

These declarations are dangerous, because their legal status is unclear. Is it merely an undertaking not to sue, which can be reneged upon later (perhaps by inheritors who do not have the same objection to copyright law)? How broad is the declaration? 

A modern example is Nina Paley’s Copyheart: “♡ Copying is an act of love. Please copy.” (http://copyheart.org/)

A good illustration of the dangers of such a declaration is folk musician Woodie Guthrie, who included a notice on his recordings from the 1940s: ‘This song is Copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of Copyright # 154085, for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin it without our permission, will be mighty good friends of ourn, cause we don’t give a dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that’s all we wanted to do’.

Despite the declaration, these days a number of companies claim copyright over Guthrie’s songs. 

Types of works
Software
F/OSS (free/open source software) or FLOSS (free, libre and open source software) are terms that encompass the three main terms for FLO software. 


Open knowledge and free cultural works
Free cultural works: Free cultural works are those that are under a free cultural licence and that meet the further requirements of a free cultural work as described in the Definition of Free Cultural Works. Significantly:
It is possible for a work to be under a FLO licence but not meet these further requirements. For example, a song under a FLO licence only available for download in the proprietary MP3 format would not qualify (as soon as someone downloaded it and converted it to the free file format OGG, it would become a free cultural work, however). Nor would Fantastique Unfettered, which is under a FLO licence but only available in hardcopy. 

Free content: A generic term for a free cultural work. 

Open knowledge: Open knowledge describes content and data that is under an open knowledge licence and that meets the further requirements of open knowledge as described in the Open Definition. Significantly: 
As with free cultural works, it is possible for a work to be under a FLO licence but not meet these further requirements. 

Interestingly, it is possible for a work to qualify as a free cultural work but not as open knowledge, and vice versa. Open knowledge does not need to be available in a free file format; free cultural works do. Open knowledge needs to be available for no more than reasonable reproduction cost; for free cultural works, only the ‘source data’ must be available. 

Open data: Open data is a form of open knowledge. 

Open content: Open content has been used in two senses. 
This glossary uses the former definition. The latter definition does not clearly delimit works (the removal of a single copyright restriction qualifies, as does the removal of all restrictions). In addition, the former definition matches open source (making open content the content version of software), whereas the latter is much broader than open source.  

Other
Free file format: A free file format is publicly available in its entirety and not encumbered by copyright, patent, trademark or other legal restrictions. Defined by LINFO.

Open format: According to LINFO, an open format is a format that is publicly available but may be encumbered by intellectual property law. My preference would be to treat ‘free file format’ and ‘open file format’ as synonyms, and describe publicly available file formats as ‘public file formats’.

Free/libre protocols and open standards: I don’t really understand these. For a definition of open standards, see Krechmer's definitive work: http://www.csrstds.com/openstds.html

Open source hardware/open hardware: Open source hardware describes physical technology that is under FLO licences or free from patent restrictions, as appropriate. FLO licences only concern copyright law, not patent law, but hardware could infringe copyright and patent law.

Works under FLO licences that do not meet other criteria
To qualify as FLO, software must have its source code available. The Free Software Definition makes this clear in freedoms two and four. The Open Source Definition, in clause two, requires that programs ‘include source code’ or provide ‘a well-publicized means of [cheaply] obtaining the source code’, and that ‘Deliberately obfuscated source code is not allowed’ nor are ‘Intermediate forms’. 

As such, a program could be under a FLO licence (or even public domain) but not FLO if its code was lost. 

It is unclear how this rule applies to creative works other than software. Programs are modified and adapted through their source code, and it is difficult or impossible to reverse engineer that code if it is not available. The same is not true for a hardcopy book, which can be transcribed or scanned with OCR (optical character recognition). 

The Open Knowledge Definition and the Definition of Free Cultural Works touch on this issue. To qualify as a free cultural work, 

To qualify as open knowledge, 

Both of these definitions make it clear that a work only available in hardcopy is not a free cultural work/open knowledge, even though it might be under a FLO licence and it would be trivial to scan it and place it online. 

However, it is still not clear what a ‘modifiable form’ is or what qualifies as ‘source data’. Is a scanned image (under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike licence) of a completed painting in a free file format a free cultural work? What about a photograph that has been manipulated in a computer program where the original has been lost?

This glossary describes works as FLO if (a) they are software, they are under a FLO licence and their source is available or (b) they are not software and they are under a FLO licence, even if they are only available in hardcopy or electronically but without source code. 

Requirements on FLO licences
Although I haven’t found a declaration or definition that outlines these requirements, there seems to be an assumption that a valid FLO licence:
With regards to the former requirement, this is different from the public domain. Public domain works are FLO, but they could become non-FLO if legislation is revised. No FLO licence allows this revision or revocation, however. 

With regards to the latter requirement, this means that a FLO licence cannot diminish existing rights and permissions. For example, the Open Game License allows you to use content from the Dungeons & Dragons roleplaying game, but only if you don’t use certain words like ‘yuan-ti’ and ‘illithid’. Since these words are not protected by copyright law, this is an additional requirement—making the licence non-FLO.

The Open Game License could be revised to avoid this by saying that the licence does not grant permission to use words like ‘yuan-ti’ or ‘illithid’, but that it does not limit any existing right to use those words. 

The free/open divide
Although free and open are synonyms, they emphasise different aspects of FLO works and licensing and the use of one over the other is highly politicised. 

The term free software refers to freedom, and by extension rights and liberties. By contrast, the term open source was coined as a marketing exercise to make free software more palatable to business and government. 

For free software advocates, FLO licences are an ethical imperative - but ideally, copyright reform would grant freedom to users of all computer software. In contrast, open source advocates argue that open source software is better both for software developers and for consumers. 

This ideological divide has blurred, in particular outside of the realm of software. The Open Knowledge Foundation, for example, seems to believe open knowledge is an ethical imperative. 

Further reading:

Public copyright licences
A public copyright licence (or public licence) is a licence by which a licensor can grant additional copyright permissions to licensees and in which the licensees are unlimited. In other words, when a public copyright licence is applied to a work, it can be used by any person according to the conditions of the licence. 

The New York Times also described these as open copyright licences, although this causes confusion with FLO licences, which are a subcategory of public copyright licences. 

An example of a non–public copyright licence is the (now deprecated) Creative Commons Developing Nations License, which only applied to people living in certain countries (not unlimited licensees). 

Narrower definition
The Open Knowledge Foundation has used a narrower definition of a public copyright licence, which is that the licensors and licensees are unlimited. In other words, any person could apply the public copyright licence to their works. Compare to the UK Open Government License, which would need to be re-written to be used by anyone other than the government of the United Kingdom. This glossary uses the broader definition.

The Open Definition describes copyright licences where the licensors are limited as 'non-reusable licences'. (http://opendefinition.org/licenses/)

Conditions
The most common conditions on public copyright licences are:

Who do the conditions apply to?
When a creator applies a public copyright licence to their works, they are removing restrictions on other people. They are not restricting themselves—or anyone that they contract with—in any way. For example, an author who places a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial licence on their work can still reproduce it for commercial purposes themselves, or give permission to others to reproduce it commercially. 

Shareable content
I use the term ‘shareable content’ (or ‘shareable resources’ or ‘shareable works’) to refer to works that can at least be shared verbatim by any person for non-commercial purposes without infringing copyright law. This includes all FLO works, as well as non-FLO works like those under Creative Commons licences with the NonCommercial and NoDerivatives terms.

I prefer this term to others, like David Wiley’s definition of ‘open content’, because it avoids re-using words like ‘libre’ and ‘open’ that are already used to describe FLO. 

There is some overlap with works under public copyright licences, but it is not complete. For example, public domain works are shareable content, but they’re not under any licence. And there are public copyright licences that don’t create shareable content. For example, the Creative Commons Sampling License (now deprecated) allowed the work to be sampled, but not shared verbatim. 

Not to be confused with:

Useful concepts
Intellectual property/IP
Intellectual property is the collective term for several independent areas of law: copyright law, trademark law and patent law are the three most significant, but it also includes trade secrets, moral rights, appellations/geographical indications and a number of sui generis monopolies (database monopolies, indigenous monopolies, design monopolies, mask work/integrated circuit layout design monopolies, plant breeders' monopolies, etc.)

However, there are more differences between these areas of law than there are similarities, and widespread use of the term intellectual property dates only to the second half of the 20th century. Copyright law, patent law and trademark law protect different things in different ways from different sorts of infringement. 

It is rare that the term 'intellectual property' is necessary or even useful. It's better to refer to the specific area of the law—whether it's trademark, copyright or patent—than the generic 'intellectual property'.

There are a number of backronyms from the initialism IP, mostly coined by detractors of intellectual property. Some examples: 

See also Copyright.

Further reading: 

Copyright
Copyright law grants copyright holders the power to restrict other people’s use of their work or grant permissions to other people. A licence works within copyright law: the copyright holder is exercising their power to grant permissions. 

Methods and doctrines
Crowdsourcing
Crowdsourcing (a portmanteau of ‘outsourcing to the crowd’) is the process of obtaining content, goods or services by putting out a call to the community at large rather than assigning the task to a specific person. The term was coined in 2005 by two editors at Wired Magazine.

Sometimes, crowdsourcing is cooperative. For example, Wikipedia is a crowdsourced encyclopedia where people—on their own initiative—write and edit articles. However, it can also be competitive. A company that awarded a prize to whomever created the best logo would also be crowdsourcing. 

Crowdsourcing is often used more narrowly than this, to refer specifically to a project that uses 'the crowd' to provide source data. For example, asking people around the world to record the daily temperature or test radiation levels. 

Examples include:

Significantly, neither of these communities are FLO. 

See the Wikipedia article on this topic for many examples: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crowdsourcing

Crowdfunding also depends on the crowd, but in this case it is money that is solicited rather than labour. 

Not be be confused with open source
The term open source is often misused to describe crowdsourcing instead. One reason for this may be the term ‘source’. In open source software, it refers to the source code that makes up the program. But source is also used as a verb, to acquire something. 

The confusion is exacerbated because open source lends itself to being crowdsourced. There are a few reasons for this:


However, there is no need for open source to be crowdsourced, and there is plenty of non-FLO content that is crowdsourced. Open source software can be developed in house with little or no input from the community (the community can always fork the open source software, but the software itself is not crowdsourced). 

There are a number of terms that confuse crowdsourcing (using the public for a good or service usually provided in house) with open source (resources that are free from certain copyright restrictions). Examples include: 

Open source governance
This model of governance gives ordinary citizens the power to draft policy and directly affect the legislature and executive. As such, it bears more in common with crowdsourcing than open source, despite its name. 

Open source journalism
Open source journalism is a term used to describe crowdsourced or participatory journalism. Despite the name, it is not closely related to open source. 

Open source intelligence
Open source intelligence describes intelligence collected from public sources. Despite the name, it is not closely related to open source. 

Crowdfunding
Crowdfunding (also called crowd financing and crowdsourced fundraising) is the financing of a project through the contributions (typically small) of many individuals (‘the crowd’). Obvious examples are Kickstarter and IndieGoGo.

Relationship to FLO: While some FLO projects are crowdfunded, many are financed through traditional methods (or not at all).

Fund and release
Fund and release describes a family of methods of financing works. The common feature is that the creator or copyright holder (or potential creator, if the work does not yet exist) promises to release a work to the public if he or she receives a set amount of money. This money is either held in escrow or only pledged. 

In the threshold pledge system, the money is only released to the creator after the entire sum has been pledged. This is a way of guaranteeing to each donor that they will only be charged if enough money is raised for the work to be publicly released. Kickstarter uses the threshold pledge system, both for FLO and non-FLO works. 

The street performer protocol, on the other hand, only delivers the money to the creator upon delivery of the work. This is a way of guaranteeing that the creator does not cut and run with the money. While the authors who coined this term described the release of public domain works as an application of the protocol, the protocol could also be applied to proprietary works.

Where the fund and release model is used to release FLO works, it could be described as a 'copyright buy-out'. 

Further reading:

Pay-what-you-want
When a good or service is available on a ‘pay-what-you-want’ basis, the customer decides how much to pay. Sometimes, a floor or ceiling price is in place, or perks may encourage payments at particular levels.

Some FLO projects use a pay-what-you-want system. An example is the Commonly Open Bundle. People who contributed any amount of money received a download link with the assets. This also has a ransom element—if the bundle raises $10,000, the assets will be licensed under Creative Commons Zero. 

Donations are not really ‘pay-what-you-want’, because there is no good or service to be exchanged. The donation isn’t required to access the work. 

Open government
Open government (also called open governance) is the notion that citizens should have access to the documents of government: the text of statutes, the reasons for decisions, internal reports, and so on.

Relationship to FLO: There is no need for open government to be FLO. As long as the works are readily accessible, they may remain all rights reserved. It does not even need to be open access or gratis: information that is available for a nominal fee or available in libraries but not online can still enable open government. 

Shareware 
Shareware describes software provided on a limited basis; the user must pay to access the unencumbered product. The name is deceptive. 

Not to be confused with: 

Open marketing
Open marketing describes totally transparent marketing by a company or project, to the extent possible in law. The term was coined by Red Hat: http://www.theopensourceway.org/book/The_Open_Source_Way-Introduction-Open_marketing.html

Not to be confused with:

'The open source way'
Red Hat and their community website opensource.com coined the term 'open source way' to describe a attitude: "a willingness to share, collaborating with others in ways that are transparent (so that others can watch and join too), embracing failure as a means of improving, and expecting—even encouraging—everyone else to do the same.

"It means committing to playing an active role in improving the world, which is possible only when everyone has access to the way that world is designed. The world is full of "source code"—blueprints, recipes, rules—that guide and shape the way we think and act in it. We believe this underlying code (whatever its form) should be open, accessible, and shared—so many people can have a hand in altering it for the better.": https://opensource.com/resources/what-open-source

This describes a broad philosophy which draws upon the crowdsourced method by which much open source software is developed, as well as an ethical commitment to removing copyright and patent restrictions where possible. It encourages FLO licensing, but is much broader than that. 

Further reading:

Non-FLO concepts
Proprietary/Non-FLO
In the area of copyright, a ‘proprietary’ work is one that is not FLO. There is proprietary shareable content as well as FLO shareable content; non-shareable content is always proprietary. 

Freeware/Gratis
As discussed above, the term 'free' in 'free, libre and open' means 'free from restrictions', not 'free of charge'. The term 'freeware' refers to software that is distributed for no cost. 'Gratis' is a broader term that refers to anything distributed for no cost.

See also:

Digital Rights Management/Digital Restrictions Management (DRM)
The euphemistically named ‘Digital Rights Management’ describes methods of controlling how recipients and customers use products after distribution or sale. For example, a single-player computer game that only runs when you are connected to the Internet or an ebook that cannot be transferred from your old ebook reader to your new one. 

Some FLO licences forbid technical restrictions being placed on the work, which includes DRM. Remember, this does not restrict the copyright holder from distributing the work under DRM, only others who want to take advantage of the FLO licence to make use of the work.  However, even if a work is under a FLO licence, if the work is only available under DRM it will not qualify as a free cultural work or open knowledge. 

Overlapping concepts
Open access
There are two competing definitions of open access:

The latter definition effectively requires that all open access works be under permissive FLO licences. Unfortunately, it is the former definition that has gained widespread acceptance, and it is the one used throughout this glossary. 

The term ‘gratis open access’ refers to baseline open access. ‘Libre open access’ has been used to refer to open access works that have fewer copyright restrictions. Note that this is a very loose use of the term libre: a work that could only be shared noncommercially or verbatim would qualify as ‘libre open access’ even though it is certainly not libre by standard usage.

Open access can be available in one of two forms. ‘Green open access’ describes a work that has been self-archived by the author in a repository or on a website, after having been published in the traditional way. ‘Gold open access’ describes a work that is made available by its publisher.

Relationship to FLO: Open access works are not necessarily FLO. They can be all rights reserved. While many FLO works are open access, not all of them are. For example, the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike periodical Fantastique Unfettered is FLO, but not available online or for no charge. 

Shared source
Microsoft used the term ‘shared source’ to describe software code that it made available online for people to read and reference. Some shared source remained all rights reserved; other code was released under FLO licences. The term could be used more broadly to describe any source code that has been made readily available to read and reference, but not necessarily to duplicate or change. 

Shared source should not be confused with open source. Almost all open source is shared source, but open source software is also free from many copyright restrictions. In addition, a program under an open source licence, with source code that is accessible from within the program but not available online would qualify as open source but not shared source. 

Shared source is similar to gratis open access, except that it refers to software rather than scholarly works. 

Not to be confused with: 

OER/Open educational resources
Open educational resources are poorly defined. At their most narrow, such as the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation definition, they are ‘resid[ing] in the public domain or [...] released under an intellectual property license that permits their free use or re-purposing by others’. UNESCO uses a similar definition: 'teaching, learning and research materials in any medium, digital or otherwise, that reside in the public domain or have been released under an open license that permits no-cost access, use, adaptation and redistribution by others with no or limited restrictions' (http://www.unesco.org/new/fileadmin/MULTIMEDIA/HQ/CI/CI/pdf/Events/Paris%20OER%20Declaration_01.pdf). Under these definitions, all OER must be FLO. 

The broader definitions simply require that OER be available at no cost for use and re-use. This includes FLO, but also includes works under Creative Commons licences with the NonCommercial terms, for example. 

Open design
Open design describes the creation of machines and other physical objects through publicly-shared information. It is unclear to me whether that information must also be FLO licensed, or if it still qualifies as open design if it is non-FLO. 

Open gaming
Open gaming describes tabletop gaming resources under either (a) FLO licences or (b) public copyright licences. Ryan Darcey, who coined the term, described open gaming licences as allowing commercial use. However, the Open Game License itself—while allowing commercial use—has other restrictions which may make it non-FLO. 

Open patents
An open patent is a patent that, when used, stops the user from exploiting their own patents in that particular field. As such, it bears similarities to the reciprocal nature of copyleft, but concerns a different area of the law. 

Definitions and declarations
Key definitions:

Other definitions:



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