The Open Content revolution has happened! ...it just didn't happen in the way we expected it.

I was recently interviewed for a London music blog Music 4.5: What the music industry can learn from the open source movement?1 Somewhat surprisingly, I gave Youtube as an example of a website where music and video is re-used in an open source fashion:

1. 1. Funny story, I was introduced to Charlotta Hedman by my former MySQL Ab collague Mark Baker, also from London, without him knowing that we are both from the small Finnish city of Jakobstad and I even worked for her dad as a teenager.

I just want to jot down a few comments here about an open-ed piece by Glyn Moody at the H-online: Why Making Money from Free Software Matters. It is a very good summary of the motivations I had in writing my book Open Life: The Philosophy of Open Source and why I have since also strived to work towards making businesses benefit from Open Source models, and vice versa, making Open Source benefit from the businesses.

Says Glyn:

Last week Red Hat announced what seems to be a significant effort to bring open source thinking into non-technical areas of life and society. This was very interesting to me, as it is a topic I have also put much thought to in my book. While the welcome announcement is dated last week, it seems the sight has been pre-seeded with posts from different Red Hat employees so that it already looks like an active community site.

One post I stumbled upon is written by Red Hat's Pam Chestek, titled Letting Go:

While everyone else is doing predictions for 2009, I want to do something different and look about 10 years forwards and backwards: ie. finish my trilogy into the past and future of Open Source and Open Other Things - let's call it Free Culture for this post. The first part and the spark to this trilogy was Nokia acquiring Symbian followed by Open Source has arrived... where's the money?. So let's complete the circle and look at how Openness is doing outside the world of software...

"The Arts"

Some years ago I posited that Music, Movies, Photos, Books and other works of art are following the same curve of development as Open Source did and that after an initial 10 years of resistance and ridicule from the established industry, something like a Creative Commons based model would win, just like Open Source is doing now for software. This is still possible, but I've come to realise the entertainment industry is also different from the software industry. (shocking! really?)

To some degree Creative Commons has been successful, for instance many people choose to upload their images on Flickr with a Creative Commons license, and myself and many others create derivative works out of those images, or just use the images for illustrations in our blogs. The Blender Foundation created the worlds first Open Source high definition short animation Elephants Dream, on the other hand I've understood this was done in a pretty traditional fashion by employing six animators that would sit and work in the Amsterdam Studios. To that extent, I'm much more excited about the Finnish Star Wreck movie and especially its successor Iron Sky. Iron Sky is being created in a very collaborative fasion on the Internet, and also other movies are free to use www.wreckamovie.com to collaborate on movie creation. Yet, it is not a 1-to-1 clone of the Open Source recipe. In particular, while there is a lot of collaboration, the script of Iron Sky is not public at all. I have to admit, there is some value in not knowing the plot when watching a movie - this is unlike software for sure.

To be clear, Iron Sky -while an extremely interesting project - isn't actually Open Source, because it uses the Non-Commercial version of Creative Commons. It is an interesting Internet phenomenon nevertheless.

Music and movies Ahoy!

Some time ago I had the opportunity to meet John Buckman and "Mrs Buckman" Jan as they visited in Helsinki. John gave a talk about his Magnatune business and Creative Commons in the Aula forum. Unfortunately, the video is not yet available online, but let's hope it gets here eventually.

If you've had a look at the fine print you'll already know, the book cover was made using Creative Commons licensed images from the Internet. It is in itself supposed to be a testimony of how you can publish books and other things as part of an Open Source continuum. I wanted to make a nice cover image and I wanted to find and use only images licensed under suitably licensed pictures. Even if I could have used some clipart too, in this case I did not want to do that out of pure principle. I wanted everything in the book to be Open Source.

Last Friday night I headed to the sauna lounge at Botta, in Helsinki center. Director of the Scifi parody Starwreck Timo Vuorensola had been invited jointly by Finnish Linux Users Group, Finnish Unix Users Group and the Helsinki University Computer Science student body.