'Open Source Media' vs 'Open Source Media, Inc'

Karl writes "Last week OSM (Open Source Media) launched to what some are calling an odd start. Most notably naming a controversy has ensued with Christopher Lydon's public radio show Open Source, a production of Open Source Media, Inc.."

Comments

"Open Source" buzzword

[Scoth]

Seems to me that "Open Source" is starting to turn into a buzzword used by people when they want the geek masses to take notice of something and proclaim it good. And it seems to work sometimes, but I guess we'll see how this goes. Some of the updates don't look promising. Could be neat though.

Re:"Open Source" buzzword

[RAMMS EIN]

Not just geeks, others too. I can't imagine Microsoft would have launched their shared source initiative just to please the geeks (most of whom wouldn't be impressed by it anyhow). 'Open source' is a marketing word just as sure as 'innovative', 'intuitive', and, ironically, 'proprietary'.

Re:"Open Source" buzzword

[AuMatar]

At work the managers have been talking about an open source repository of software at work. When I asked them what license it would bbe under, it turned out to be proprietary- it was going to be open only to internal developers (in other words, it was a place to share code withing the company). Still a good idea, but calling it open source is asking for confusion.

But yup, when the PHBs start to redefine the term, its now a buzzword.

just in time

[BushCheney08]

Alright, just in time to coincide with the launching of my company, Free Software, Inc. I'll have a product list and pricelist available shortly.

Communist Propaganda Media

[Pampusik]

Anybody else notice that most of their "current headlines" come from China's propaganda agency, Xinhua News Agency?

Odd start indeed...

Re:Communist Propaganda Media

[BushCheney08]

Silly Brit. It's not considered propaganda if it's coming from within your own country...

Re:Communist Propaganda Media

[maxzilla]

Its pretty ironic for them to do that, especially considering China's history with banning bloggers. maybe they never noticed xinhua's general slant, or maybe its all because the news tips seem user sent. could their bloggers be in support of the PRC? either way I think its a cheap attempt to use a name to support a cast of second rate bloggers...

Re:Communist Propaganda Media

[Zeinfeld]

Its pretty ironic for them to do that, especially considering China's history with banning bloggers. maybe they never noticed xinhua's general slant, or maybe its all because the news tips seem user sent. could their bloggers be in support of the PRC? either way I think its a cheap attempt to use a name to support a cast of second rate bloggers...

Or maybe the whole outfit is nothing but a front to promote wingnut propaganda for some corporate interests that have reasons for making nice with Bejing.

It might just be a mistake in configuring their moreover feed, but their terms of use which try to prohibit quoting or satire are not.

The site appears to be a carbon copy of the Huffington Post, only with right wing pundits instead of left and minus the reader comments. They have missed their moment for that, there is no shortage of right wing portal blogs without comments. What there is a growing shortage of is right wing fanatics wanting to endlessly debate why George W. Bush is absolutely right on everything.

What would make a lot more sense would be to set up a straight news and politics blog which does not have an eggregious tilt to either side. The right wing blogs play the Fox news game of pretending to be straight while delivering GOP talking points of the day verbatim. The left wing blogs make no bones about being partisan, the stated purpose of DailyKos is to campaign for Democratic candidates, Americablog makes no bones about being gay rights activism.

If you have any doubt about the right wingnut slant here just read the blogroll. Americablog? Kos? Huffington Post? Crooks and Liars? Nope. How about the commercial blogs, Salon? OK Slate, official blog of the WaPo? Nope, Nope. But pretty much every right wingnut blog you can imagine.

The cleverest thing Matt Drudge did was to put links to right and left wing media and blogs onto his home page. A lot of people still use him as a portal because the links are comprehensive. Of course that started back in the days when Drudge thought he could be a bipartisan bottomfeeder

So given the rest of the nonsense I don't see anything suprising about the deliberately misleading use of 'open source'. Clearly OSM is not open source, they don't even allow fair use of their stuff! (Like they have a choice).

Christopher Lydon appears to be refering to a different, older definition of 'open source', a term used by journalists that means publicly available information, like minutes of congress, stuff published in other media, etc. But the wingnuts are clearly using the term in the geek sense.

Re:Communist Propaganda Media

[superdude72]

Anybody else notice that most of their "current headlines" come from China's propaganda agency, Xinhua News Agency?

It's funny because they're right-wing and presumably anti-communist, but I expect this is simply lack of competence on their part. Xinhua is available with a lot of newsfeed packages and is very, very cheap. Might even be free. We used to get Xinhua when my company subscribed to a newsfeed a few years ago.

Still, if they doing any filtering of their newsfeeds I wouldn't expect they'd let Xinhua flood everything like that.

Re:Communist Propaganda Media

[CurlyG]

Rupert Murdoch hasn't been an Australian citizen for decades (he was US nationalised in 1985), and News Corp moved it's base of operations to the US in 2004.

Who is Christopher Lydon?

[CyricZ]

Who is Christopher Lydon? More specifically, what contribution to the open source community has he made? His name doesn't ring a bell with me.

Re:Who is Christopher Lydon?

[dominux]

hosts a jolly good current affairs/analysis podcast radio show. Search for Open Source in iTunes and you will find the podcast. Open Source refers to the openness of the production process and the source of the news rather than code. I found it whilst searching for podcasts about open source code, so the name was misleading to me, however the show has merit in it's own right and I am not bitter about having found it.

Re:Who is Christopher Lydon?

[metternich]

He hasn't. He's just a talk radio host on NPR. They chose the name "Open Source" because they felt that the format of their show reflected simlar values to Open Source ideals. It's also a bit of play on words. "Source" in this case means a News source. So the idea is that anyone can be News Source for the show, hence "Open Source."

Re:Who is Christopher Lydon?

[ivanski]

Christopher Lydon was the host on WBUR/NPR's "The Connection", one of the best radio interview/talk shows around. He left after a dispute with WBUR and spent some time at the Harvard Berkman Center, where he met Dave Winer and became a pioneer in podcasting by running a podcast interview show. His interviews are all available from his Berkman blog and they're consistently excellent (the breadth of the interviewees is substantial, including people such as Doc Searle, Paul Krugman, Larry Lessig, Jeffrey Sachs, Howard Dean, David Weinberger).

His company, Open Source Media, and the radio show are both very much inspired by open source values (e.g., openness, cooperation and sharing):

- All content is Creative Commons licensed (compare to OSM's obnoxious TOS).
- They actively interact with their audience through blogging.
- They involving the audience in show production (read How this works).

It doesn't seem like an unreasonable translation of the open source ethos to radio and media production within what's feasible.

I think his trademark case is pretty solid; he has a live registered mark (meaning the examiners have accepted it so they have the benefit of the doubt if someone claims it's not trademarkable) on Open Source as applied to a radio show and commentary website, and prior use of the trade name Open Source Media. The potential for confusion (the big criteria in TM issues) is substantial. OSM LLC, meanwhile uses all kinds of weaselly wording to handwave around the fact that they use the phrase "Open Source Media" as an alternate name for the operation everywhere while implying they're just "OSM" so that makes them not really infringing (if I started RH LLC but had the name "Red Hat" plastered all over my site and press releases, do you think I could be in a bit of a bind?).

I have no dog in this fight (except as a longtime fan of The Connection, which is not the same without Lydon), but there is really no contest IMO.

Full of themselves

[Army of 1 in 10]

Despite the current controversy over their choice of a name, they downplay it. Take this excerpt from their website:

Some OSM readers have expressed consternation over our new company name, so please let us take a moment to explain--in the spirit of full disclosure--the story of its origin. At the outset, we formed a company under the masthead "Pajamas Media," after that now-famous remark about bloggers being "just a bunch of people sitting around in their pajamas." Then, as the idea for the company grew, we cast about for a new name that would reflect our ethos long after the joke grew old. Some of the unsuccessful names rejected along the way were "Alpha Media" and "Jellyfish Media," so don't be so hard on us about "OSM"--it could have been worse.

Not only did they launch themselves with an anti-open source attitude (prohibitive copyright terms which they've since removed from their privacy policy), they didn't do a simple google search to make sure that no confusion would occur as a result of their name selection. OSM should have stuck with "Pajamas Media"... there's nothing wrong with that and it pokes reverent fun at those who shrug off bloggers.

It's about the software, stupid

[0xdeadbeef]

Oh, wow, we've never seen this before. A bunch of right-wingers attempt to co-opt something "hip" and "cool" and totally out of context in the effort to help sell their message. I'm shocked, shocked, that they would do such a thing.

Where's the money.

[Stumbles]

So the big question is.... who is financing these guys?

Re:Where's the money.

[shark72]

"So the big question is.... who is financing these guys?"

The startup capital is from the founders themselves -- several of them are well off, either from other blogosphere projects or from other media (Roger L. Simon writes novels). Going forward it's an ad-supported model.

Thank you Yoda

[CXI]

"Most notably naming a controversy has ensued with Christopher Lydon's public radio show"

Wouldn't one normally phrase that as: "Most notably a naming controversy has ensued with Christopher Lydon's public radio show"?

Re:Open Source - just good name

[linforcer]

How about all those Gentoo Linux users that have (nearly) everything on their systems built from source? (like me)

Re:OSM Is Chinese Communist Party Mouthpiece

[meringuoid]

It's really come to something when propaganda from the Chinese Communist Party is considered right-wing by Americans.

Betrayed the Revolution a bit, haven't we, comrades?

Re:OSM Is Chinese Communist Party Mouthpiece

[RobotRunAmok]

Um, Dood, you're citing DailyKos. Were FreeRepublic, DemocraticUnderground and Art Bell unavailable for comment?

Many of them are also shameless racists

[Anonymous Coward]

Like Charles Johnson and Michelle Malkin. Johnson runs Little Green Footballs, a website largely devoted to providing mouthbreathing bigots an opportunity to discuss how we ought to be wiping the "Islamofascists" off the earth by whatever means necessary. Malkin, on the other hand, is a shrill little lunatic who believes that its perfectly acceptable - nay, that it's morally incumbent upon us, - to inter and imprison whole classes of people based solely on racial and religious criteria. That these people may themselves have never been involved in, or entertained any ideas of, terrorist activity means nothing - if you're swarthy and/or Muslim, you're deserving of being locked up in the interests of US national security.

I don't mind conservatives speaking their minds and having opinons, but these people and their ilk are beyond the pale. Mass murder and inprisonment, just because you're afraid of what people who share the same ethnic or religious designation, that's irrational and completely unacceptable in a democratic state like the US. These people are no better than white supremacists - they've merely picked target groups that aren't taboo yet.

Re:Many of them are also shameless racists

[DrSkwid]

That's news, I wasn't aware Islam was a race.

Re:Many of them are also shameless racists

[Xcott Craver]

"Although I agree that Johnson is not explicit in his views, the rantings of genocide on his blog are normally entertained wholeheartedly by the other commentors to his posts."

Mine is a controversial view, but I've long ago decided that you can judge a political blog by its reader comments.

There are some politically slanted blogs whose authors claim to have no slant. But reading the comments, you can see what type of people resonate with the content. Since that is out of your control as a blogger, and since there are some really stupid people out there, it might upset you that I judge your blog by the people who comment on it. However, when it comes to political views, your exact words matter less than the theme of what you're saying. Posters carry the theme in different words.

Caj

Background

[cca93014]

Interesting background on the creation of OSM:

http://dennisthepeasant.typepad.com/dennis_the_pea sant/2005/11/the_certain_thi.html

Doesn't sound like their principles are very "open source"...

"Hip" and "Cool"?

[Petersko]

...attempt to co-opt something "hip" and "cool" and totally out of context...

Oh please. I'm as much a geek as the next guy, but I'm not going to pretend there's anything "hip" or "cool" about open source.

I can see it now. "Hey baby. I'm hip. Check out my apache install. I'm so cool, I'm running linux. Now how about going back to your place? No? What... that guy? What's so great about him? Sure, he knows wines, plays tennis, and can dance, but seriously, isn't it cooler to know all the switches to the gnu c++ compiler?"

I'm not saying there's no appeal, but that appeal isn't widespread enough to cross into the realm of "hip" and "cool". We've all seen those terrible television spots where balding parents make terribly embarassing attempts to show how hip they are. Lets apply our adjectives a little more judiciously.

Re:OSM Is Chinese Communist Party Mouthpiece

[Doc Ruby]

Why should Chinese people be the only ones to be true to the propaganda that got their people to revolt against the old boss?

The Chinese Communists are a militaristic mafia. They have nothing to do with actual collectivism, destroying class structure, universal "ownership" banishing property, equal distribution of surplus labor. They're mafia capitalists, dictating the transformation of China into a moneymaking factory for their benefit and perpetuation of their power. That's rightwing: fascist corporatism government.

Long before "Open Source" meant software....

[N8F8]

Long before "Open Source" meant software is was in widespread use in the military intel community to refer to publicly available information such as news and publications. In fact, it is still used that way.

Language Log's take

[h4ter]

Linguist Mark Liberman wrote about this the other day. Explains how OSM Media LLC took the Open Source name without any of the philosophy intact.

Re:OSM Is Chinese Communist Party Mouthpiece

[Doc Ruby]

Well, it did take a few clicks thru the page to which I linked to eventually get to one that linked to OSM. Maybe that's because of OSM's draconian Terms of Service: "You may not reproduce, distribute, copy, publish, enter into any database, display, modify, create derivative works, transmit, or in any way exploit any part of this site." "Open Source" Media indeed. And Judy Miller is a "journalist".

BTW, I'm looking at the OSM homepage, which says:

CURRENT HEADLINES
XIN: Xinhua domestic news advisory -- Nov. 22
XIN: Vietnam reports suspected bird flu fatality
UPI: Whooping crane eggs: one or two?
XIN: Venezuela to supply Argentina with cheap diesel oil
XIN: Xinhua International News Advisory -- Nov. 22
AP: Woodward Explains Silence in Leak Case
AP: Wagner Starts Two-Day Tour of New York
XIN: Xinhua world news summary at 0030 GMT, Nov. 22
AP: Wave Systems Shares Advance on Dell Deal

That's 50% of their frontpage headlines, #1 ahead of AP and UPI. All that really just reflects badly on AP, especially when you consider that UPI is a Moonie propaganda organ. Getting the picture?

Re:Open Source - just good name

[flood6]

One sector of OSS people tend to forget about is all the free software for web development like PHPNuke, PostNuke, Mambo/Jahhombala, and the countless others; large and small.

You can't swing a dead cat without hitting a Gaming Clan Site based on phpBB or *Nuke. In nearly all those cases you could probably describe the webmaster as a "regular" OSS user. They're just the knob that got volunteered to maintain the site. They've likely had to patch their sites and at least install a template of some kind. Their sites would all be the same (some might argue that they are) if they couldn't access and modify the source they downloaded under the GPL or similar license.

I kind of think average OSS users interact with their source more often than someone might expect.

'.org' and false advertising

[Simon Brooke]

OK, OK, maybe it's a bit strange to post this comment on slashdot.org , but the point at which I got really cross about all this was the point at which the pajama party adopted the domain 'osm.org'. The .org top-level domain is, at least in theory, intended for non-commercial, non-governmental, non-academic use. By describing themselves as osm.org the pajamas are making an implied claim to be non-commercial, which is not true and is consequently false advertising. Yes, I know this applies to slashdot as well...

to finish the phrase

[QMO]

...when there are multiple corporations competing for business in the same market.

Political revolutions (and elections) are similar. During the revolution (and campaigning), any faction trying to gain market share does lots of things to convince people they're the "good guys." After the revolution (or election), the new holders of power stop trying to please, unless they're convinced that they could lose their position if people aren't satisfied.

I don't fully agree myself in this post, but I thought this observation should be mentioned.

Re:Ad-hominem attacks are for the logically impair

[IceAgeComing]

And Islamofascism is not a race--it's an ideology, a dark and sinister one that has spread terrorism throughout the ages. I would be surprised if you could find anyone who thinks the idea of a global caliphate is a good one!

There are many dark and sinister ideologies. I suggest you focus on those existing within your sphere of influence and let the peaceful practitioners of Islam confront theirs. I know you think you live in an enlightened society, but it is my belief that any society whose leaders condone violence as a legitimate tool of societal change are too close to the Dark Side.