Santa Cruz, CA
For the last decade Karsten has been teaching and living the open source way. As a member of Red Hat's premier community leadership team, he helps with various community activities in the Fedora Project and other projects Red Hat is involved in. As a 15 year IT industry veteran, Karsten has worked most sides of common business equations as an IS manager, professional services consultant, technical writer, and developer advocate.
Karsten lives in his hometown of Santa Cruz, CA with his wife and two daughters on their small urban farm, Fairy-Tale Farm, where they focus on growing their own food and nurturing sustainable community living.
Authored Comments
That is a good example because the researchers misunderstand what open source is about, fundamentally. In doing so, they equate it really with crowdsourcing - viral video remixes and such that are essentially illegal copyright infringement that a business allows people to get away with doing because they have no reason to say no.
The definition of open source in that study says that, "those developing software sought to make program designs transparent and to utilise the collective intelligence of other internet users to develop and refine the software." It entirely skips the most important part, where a license provides <a href="http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html">essential freedoms</a> to the open sourced work. The kind of fauxpen source Web 2.0 marketing in that study does not have this essential freedom at it's core. It can never be open marketing, because the very materials of the marketing are owned and controlled by the one entity least able to be objective about how the materials are used.
This in fact is one of the reasons why people who prefer the term "free software" have so many problems with how the term "open source" is used. Because open source puts a thin veil in front of the licensing and essential freedoms, it is easy for people to misunderstand and think the model is about crowdsourcing.
Fellow opensource.com writer Chris Grams said it very well in his article, "<a href="https://opensource.com/business/10/4/why-open-source-way-trumps-crowdsourcing-way">Why the open source way trumps the crowdsourcing way</a>". But even Chris missed the opportunity to really highlight how the essential freedoms are what makes the open source way actually work. If I'm not free to read, remix, create, and distribute from your marketing materials, then it is not open marketing. It is a crowdsourcing trick, at best, and <a href="https://opensource.com/business/09/9/tom-sawyer-whitewashing-fences-and-building-communities-online">a bit of ol' Tom Sawyer</a> at worst.
I made a pointer to this article and started gathering writing actions about this section of 'The Open Source Way':
https://www.theopensourceway.org/wiki/Talk:Introduction
Keep the ideas coming, I'll put them there; or <a href="https://www.theopensourceway.org/wiki/Main_Page#How_to_contribute">get an account</a> and start adding them yourself.