It is no secret that I think that the vast majority of people involved in so-called open educational resources don't think about the big picture, they just jump on the metaphorical bandwagon, and the future be damned. My biggest gripe is the widespread misuse of the Creative Commons NonCommercial (NC) restriction in licenses, and I have published on this in the literature as well as in numerous blog posts. The NC restriction has a legitimate purpose, but most uses of it do not conform to that legitimate purpose.
When Free Software, and its weaker cousin Open Source, came on the scene there was quite a lot of emphasis placed on encouraging commercial contributions. When it comes to software, therefore, there is no equivalent to the NC restriction. Software people were quick to recognize that the long term success of their movements (Free and Open Source) and private sector CONTRIBUTION was encouraged. Of course, the flip side of 'contribution' is USE. Oh duh!
In part, term Open Source, which removed the ambiguous (in English) word “free” from the terminology, led to the largely meaningless and undefinable term “Open” Educational Resources, which grew out of David Wiley's pioneering work on Open Content, MIT's Open Courseware (OCW), and UNESCO's desire not to be left out of an emerging powerful trend.
Unlike with software, a lot of the development of OER has been fostered by donor funding to large institutions with powerful brands and intellectual gravity. This has resulted in the notion of funding 'mana from heaven' production to feed the intellectually hungry and mentally starving masses of the developing world. There may have been some in those institutions who believed this lie, apparently the donors did, but mostly the origin of OERs in the OCW world was about enhancing already brands. And if you look at he position of MIT on the Webometrics world rankings this has been successful despite the pretty poor quality of the 'mana from MIT'.
But the usurping of a good idea for other purposes, and the emphasis on a 'mana from heaven' approach has meant that the focus of OER is on USE, and not on CONTRIBUTION and community as it always has been with Free and Open Source Software. It is this focus on USE, with little consideration or mention of potential contributions that has created the widespread and mostly mindless use of the NC restriction in OERs. This, coupled with the apparent lack of intellectual capacity in MIT academics has been a key driver of NC.
Software and educational content are both products of the human mind, and in fact software is content. There is no fundamental differences between software and other kinds of mental output, other than the fact that bad software won't run but bad content can take over the world if the brand behind it is strong enough. The reason for the success of Free and Open Source Software, however, is precisely because of the fact that it encourages commercial entities to contribute. Focusing on use would be a mistake, as the visionary founder of the movement, Richard Stallman recognised in creating the GNU General Public License.
The emphasis on contribution has meant that companies large and small have been able to contribute input to software. Currently, about three quarters of the Linux code is written by developers who are employed by commercial institutions. IBM has invested about a billion dollars in Linux. Red Hat recently became the first billion dollar FOSS company, and the system that I am using to edit this post has benefited enormously from their contribution. The fact that they also use the software is irrelevant, it is their contribution that matters. Companies that realise revenue from creating and editing bitmap images have contributed to the GIMP, the package that I use for all my graphics editing. Sun Microsystems created Java, and the OpenOffice suite that was forked into LibreOffice and which I used to edit this blog post. It is not just large companies that have contributed to software, my own small company has used a number of packages and libraries, and produced our own framework a nd set of tools. In using other software in our applications, we have found and fixed bugs and contributed them back to the source of those packages.
In short, the billions of dollars that have been contributed by commercial entities to FOSS has been a major factor in the success of the software ecosystem and of individual applications. Without this input and contribution from commercial sources, FOSS would be much poorer, much less useful, and the benefit to education would be far less. The focus of FOSS on contribution, and the focus of OER on use is a defining difference between them. There are no other major differences worth noting or that can be supported by evidence that is not circular.
Unless the OER community wakes up to this difference, and understands that it is NOT about use, it is about CONTRIBUTION, and it is contribution that creates the benefit for use, then OER is doomed to be a much poorer ecosystem than it has the potential to be. We must rid ourselves of the preoccupation with use, get rid of the NC restriction except where it is necessary (which it rarely is), and not just permit commercial contribution. We must actively encourage it, foster it, beg for it, show its benefits and celebrate it. Then we OER will live up to its potential. And this can be done without compromising the brand-building and marketing opportunities that so many are chasing as their excuse for participation in the currently restricted OER ecosystem.
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