Open Content III: the code

As the previous article in this series pointed out, one of the key developments in the rise of open content was the drafting of suitable licenses to codify the freedom to use these materials in various ways. One important licensing option is that of modifying open content to create new works. Licenses may open up the possibility of such collaborative ventures, but on their own are not enough. Practical tools are needed to help people to work together on open content. For that, software code is required alongside the legal code, and application development has played just as important role in the rise of open content as the refining of appropriate licenses.

The catalytic effect of tools can be seen in the sphere of blogs, which represent a very popular, if coarse-grained, kind of online collaboration. Several online Web diaries were around as early as 1995, the same year that the authors of Suck's mordant posts first stepped onto the punishing daily treadmill that has become a hallmark of top blogs. But the term “weblog” only appeared in December 1997, and was shortened to “blog” in 1999, by which time there were just 23 of them according to one count.

The trigger for their rapid growth was the arrival of tools such as LiveJournal, Pita, Blogger and Groksoup in 1999 that made creating blog posts as easy as sending an email. Once the medium began to take off, keeping up with all the postings became a problem. Technology provided the solution through the Really Simple Syndication (RSS) standard, which grew out of earlier work by Dave Winer and Netscape. Once in place, this apparently obscure XML standard allowed blog readers to subscribe to a blog feed – vastly easier than going to a blog and reading posts one by one.

The availability of this technical solution drove the readership of blogs to even higher levels. Now the problem became not so much reading the posts you had subscribed to, but finding blogs of interest among the millions out there. The solution – dedicated blog search engines like Technorati – flowed from another of Dave Winer's technical innovations: the blog ping. Each time someone made a post to a blog created with Winer's software, the program pinged his site weblogs.com, which held a record of all such postings. Blog search engines like Technorati could therefore use the pings as a signal to refresh their indexes for the site in question, ensuring that they were always up-to-date. By contrast, conventional search engines tend to be days or even weeks behind the rapid posting rhythm that distinguishes blogs from traditional Web pages.

Blogs are clearly collaborative – their essence is the intellectual give-and-take between those posting, quoting and linking, and those commenting, which together create a kind of patchwork communal document. But to allow a more thoroughgoing and fine-grained collaboration, where texts could be modified right down to the level of individual words, a new kind of software had to be developed, what came to be called the wiki.

Significantly, it was in the world of coding that this solution emerged. Ward Cunningham, now employed by the Eclipse Foundation, is well-known for his work on areas like agile development and extreme programming. Many of agile development's principles read as if they were referring to open source and open content, notably in valuing “individuals and interactions over processes and tools,” and “customer collaboration over contracts negotiation”.

Another important field that Cunningham has been associated with is design patterns, notably through his Portland Pattern Repository. It was for the latter that Cunningham created WikiWikiWeb in 1995 as a way of facilitating the exchange of ideas between programmers. The name “wiki” comes from a Hawaiian term meaning “quick”, and was chosen in part for its alliteration with the word “Web”, mimicking “WorldWideWeb”. The “quickness” refers to the ease with which Wiki pages can be added or edited, allowing content to be worked on in a true collaborative fashion.

This apparently minor modification of previous Web technologies has led to a proliferation of large-scale collaborative open content, both on the public Web and, increasingly, on corporate intranets. Perhaps the most famous example is Wikipedia, which grew out of Nupedia, an earlier online encyclopedia. Nupedia did not employ the wiki's completely open approach for content creation, and never got beyond producing a handful of articles, whereas Wikipedia has already passed the one million article mark for the English language alone.

Alongside Wikipedia there is Wikimedia Commons, which offers non-textual open content – images, sounds and videos. But unlike the main Wikipedia articles, these are rarely edited or modified, even though many are released under licenses that would permit this. Similarly, the huge holdings of open content images on Flickr tend to be used as they are, rather than as the basis for derived works. As well as these consolidated collections, there is Yotophoto, a dedicated open content search engine for images, and similar facilities on Google, Yahoo and the open source Nutch (all available from the Creative Commons search page, included by default among the Firefox search engines), which allow material to be found across the Web.

The ready availability of graphical open content raises the question of what might be done with it. Tools like GIMP have been around for years, but so far there does not seem to be the same kind of broad collaborative tradition for graphics as there is for texts. An interesting first attempt can be found in Kollabor8, and recently the film “Elephant's Dream”, produced using the 3D graphics creation package Blender, has been released under a Creative Commons license.

One area of non-textual open content where collaboration does seem to be thriving is that of music. This is probably for both historical and technical reasons. Musicians have always used the work of others as springboards for their own music, often incorporating tunes, motifs or chord progressions directly. In addition, the well-defined time-based nature of music (beats/bars/phrases) provides an easily-grasped framework within which fragments/samples from various sources can be placed either sequentially or simultaneously – something lacking for graphical images, where spatial relationships are not so formally defined. The abundance of high-quality open source music creation, editing and mixing software may be another contributory factor.

Whatever the reason, open content music is flourishing, as the existence of a number of music sites offering material for remixing indicates. One recent commercial example is My Life in the Bush of Ghosts [Flash], by David Byrne and Brian Eno, while, on the non-commercial side, the Creative Commons site has a flourishing audio/music section. Past and present projects found there include the Wired CD, which offered tracks from major artists that were made freely available for remixing (though usually only for non-commercial purposes), and the ccMixter site. The latter encourages musicians to upload samples, and to take each other's music for use as the basis of new open content works which can then be added to the pool of raw materials for others to work on. An alternative approach is offered by MyVirtualBand, which enables collaboration to take place even earlier in the creative process.

Glyn Moody writes about open source and open content at opendotdotdot.