Just caught this blog from Tom Sullivan over at InfoWorld and was pleased to see that the actual intent of what we’re trying to do was captured perfectly. As he notes, the actual release of the content for free isn’t new.
But with this release we are indeed taking a page from the open source world, realizing that sometimes to get something, you have to give something back. In this case, we’re hoping that the potential collaboration and information interchange (we’ll have more on that shortly, I hope) that is made possible by the open release of the content is more valuable than keeping it under lock and key.
Does that mean we’ll license all of our content under the Creative Commons license? No, not tomorrow anyway. But just as software providers such as BEA, IBM, Novell, Sun and a host of others are embracing open source selectively and judiciously for their businesses, so too do we expect to carefully consider the role that open content will play in ours.
I see no reason to believe that the open source model is any less applicable to our business model than it is to software. It’s not one-to-one, of course, because of the inherent differences between source code and analysis, but at the end of the day they are both just information. Information that can be used and built on. If you allow it.
