For example, I said a “little fisking” in the post to make fun of your style of picking a few points and criticizing them, rather than talking about what was said as a whole I would have thought this would have been apparent from the playful title. This is much the same way that you missed my playful way of creating an extreme analogy when I wrote, “Imagine if all the active members of Greenpeace. . .” Tongue in cheek is a rhetorical strategy after all. Not all of us are deadpan serious all the time.

And you know, I do believe that one must use open source software to be an open source advocate. But this doesn’t mean that copyfighters are not open source advocates if they don’t use it on their weblogs. I’m sure everyone who supports open source either uses Mozilla, or Mac OSX or OpenOffice. What I’ve been trying to point out is that copyfighters as whole are not best supporting the open source movement when there seems so little representation of open source software among the weblogs of the most visible, active academics in this discourse. Saying that we need to “walk the walk” is a realistic observation that if copyfighters want to encourage others to use open source software, which is another way of demonstrating “openness,” then using it on our weblogs is a very visible way of making a point.

So I don’t know why you went the radicalism/party line route, unless it was to support an immediate reaction against what I wrote initially. After all, the label of “radical” is not a good thing for the open source movement. Particularly since the open source movement is now popularly accepted within the IT industry and is no longer the lunatic finge there. Certainly, the public doesn’t really understand it yet (and this includes most people in the academy, too), but that doesn’t make it radical. Nor does it reveal sympathetic tendencies toward a movement, to label it radical in a burst of negative criticism. In that case, the rhetorical strategy seems more to me, and would to others, a method of attacking the movement, not supporting it.

Finally, “Charlie, in his response to me, seems to be asking: can one engage the ideas of the open source movement without engaging its material practices? I might ask in return: can one engage the material practices of the open source movement without engaging its ideas?”

As you know, I’ve been doing both for quite a while But truthfully, yes. One can be working positively toward changing the state of IP by working hard to make use of, and spread the use of, open source/open content without heavily engaging the ideas of the movement since more open source/open content use means less proprietary software and controlled content, putting less in the pockets of those who would continue to make IP a property to be exploited.

Clancy defines a “copyfigher” as “someone who engages in conversations on authorship and intellectual property” and as someone who examines “our current copyright model–automatic copyright, life + 70 years as soon as the content is put into a fixed medium–and express some kind of qualm about it; they think it should change in some way”. In other words, a “copyfighter” takes issue with the construction of the ownership of ideas as associated with contemporary copyright law. In that sense, I think Clancy’s right: I am indeed a copyfighter, because I’ve been using my economic perspective to question the myth of the scarcity of student writing.

“Open source” is a little harder to define. The Wikipedia entry is one good place to start, but I imagine you’re looking for something a little more succinct. AKMA offers a nice taxonomy that should give an idea of what’s being discussed, but not everybody agrees with him. There’s also a useful definition here. Many folks agree that any “open source” text can be freely modified and redistributed by anyone; beyond that, stuff gets complicated.

Charlie and Clancy: care to help refine these definitions?

Maybe my previous post was in some ways oblique. This one, I thought, was fairly clear. Clancy’s recent writing supports my supposition.

So why are you picking a fight when there’s nothing there to fight over?

Copyfighting has already been explored within some of the meme and is difficult to define because it’s a fairly new, popular term. However, I have an article which has a section that may help with understanding what open source is, as well as open access, open content and copyleft. These terms have clear definitions, although they can be difficult to grasp at first. See the section beginning with Open Source and Copyleft in this page of Copyright, Access and Digital Texts. If that’s not enough, then the Wikipedia link above is the way to go for understanding more about open source.

AKMA’s taxonomy is ultimately not very useful for understanding the terminology. For the past several years, I’ve seen many scholars toss around the term “open source” where it is obvious that they don’t really understand the principles of open source–free “source code” seems to be the buzz that catches on. So AKMA’s taxonomy represents more the way that some scholars have loosely appropriate the term rather then offering real clarity.

On the other hand, Taran Rampersad is trying to get at these principles in a way that may make more sense to academics with his concept of intellectual usability and how it fits in with notions of freedom (note that Taran is talking about copyleft, although I would offer that his concept applies to open source in general). dive into mark and Burningbird have pieces about MovableType licensing, open source and free software. I think Mark’s getting at the concept of freedom which is the important principle of open source a little better than Burningbird. But both of these get into the free software definition of free is in speech, not free as in beer (see the Wikipedia again for a detailed explanation).