This is more like commercial open source companies who make code available via the GPL or other open source licenses, but can also make it available under a commercial license, since they own copyright on the code.

The Knight Foundation News Challenge, Open Source, and the Future of Hyperlocal – [link to post]

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They’re half-sisters. MSNBC is the cable TV company, owned by NBC, based in New York, while msnbc.com is the news Web site, owned by Microsoft and NBC, based in Redmond, Wash. It’s the Web site that’s buying EveryBlock.

The Knight Foundation: Future of Hyperlocal – [link to post] (via @SeanToohey) #hyperlocal

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… it would mean that MSNBC.com would be obligated to continue to make code available for their improvements and derivative works.

I’m not sure you’re right about that — MSNBC.com owns the copyright now. They have privileges that the rest of us don’t if they own the copyright.

Which isn’t to take a position on what is right or wrong, just to say that in the present situation, had the code been released Affero-GPL, MSNBC.com would still be able to take it and run with it.

RT @mediatwit: The Knight Foundation News Challenge, Open Source, and the Future of Hyperlocal [link to post]

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Nice overview: The Knight Foundation News Challenge, Open Source, and the Future of Hyperlocal [link to post] (via @chanders)

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I agree this may be “functions as designed” – and those who are disappointed may by missing the point.

But what if the Knight Foundation required an Affero GPL license? That also would’t auto-magically create a vibrant community, but it would mean that MSNBC.com would be obligated to continue to make code available for their improvements and derivative works.

On the other hand, that likely would have prevented MSNBC.com from doing the acquisition at all, and if there was no community in place to pick up, support, and continue to drive development, the project might have ended there.

I’m not at all convinced that this would be a better outcome for the Knight Foundation, for the EveryBlock folks, or for the community at large.

I guess the question comes down to intent – what the Knight Foundation hopes to get by requiring a GPL release. If what they require is that the code they funded be available for use by others, they have succeeded. If their intent is to create a viable community and associated open source project, perhaps they should reconsider how the requirement is stated.

And, while Knight requires grantees to publish our source code using an open source license (I think they specify only “GPL”) they have never (to my knowledge) asked people to build any kind of community around the software they’re developing. Community using the news? Sure. But not community building the infrastructure.

I suspect that Knight mostly got what they wanted out of this–even though the project got bought up, the code is still there for someone else to pick up and build from. Similarly, had Everyblock folded post-funding the code would still be there for anyone who didn’t want to see it die.

The Knight Foundation News Challenge, Open Sourc… [link to post] #postrank #opensource

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“Communities are great at creating (and maintaining, supporting, …) code: code is not great at creating communities” [link to post]

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I think you are right that the future isn’t bright for Everyblock developing in to a vital open source project with a strong community if the original developers aren’t initially working to foster that community.

The news challenge seems to be designed to give people a chance to explore and prove an idea. In exchange they are expected to share what they learned.

You can argue that developing a community around their code should be part of the requirement to share what they’ve learned, but developing community is a significant amount of work in and of itself and so would take away from the time and effort available to explore the prove the idea in the first place. The source code, on the other hand, is an efficient expression of at least some of the learning they’ve done, it is a necessary part of proving the idea in the first place.

I think the news challenge strikes the right balance here. Whether or not a community forms around it, they’ve released some interesting code for harvesting public data, and for presenting it. I think in the next week or so I’m going to try getting it running on one of our servers so we can explore integrating some of the information it acquires into a project we are working on. We’ll see what happens after that.

The K… [link to post]

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#microlocal es mejor término q #hyperlocal http://bit.ly/1mLeVB y el código fuente no es suficiente para crear comunidades [link to post]

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RT @jayrosen_nyu Knight News Challenge, Open Source, and the Future of Hyperlocal. [link to post] (via @chanders) #futureof

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RT @baratunde: RT @jayrosen_nyu Knight News Challenge, Open Source, and the Future of Hyperlocal. [link to post] (via @chanders)#futureof

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RT @jayrosen_nyu: Knight News Challenge, Good post on the sale of Everyblock [link to post] (via @chanders)

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RT @jayrosen_nyu Knight News Challenge, Open Source and the Future of Hyperlocal Good post on the sale of Everyblock [link to post]

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Knight News Challenge, Open Source, and the Future of Hyperlocal. Good post on the sale of Everyblock [link to post] (via @chanders)

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Best post I’ve seen so far on EveryBlock acquisition, open-source, and community [link to post]. Nuanced, fair, asks right ?s.

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Via a comment by Michael Bernstein on this O’Reilly Radar blog post, I was pointed to this thread on mailing list for the ebcode project, in which Adrian Holovaty says:

. . . our grant has run out, and we’re no longer
obligated to open-source anything from this day forward.

But, with that said, we’re going to see what sort of usage the code
gets and play it by ear. It’ll be interesting to see what happens,
given it’s an extremely niche product, as opposed to a general-purpose
framework like Django.