search

okfn / website

The code behind okfn.org
https://okfn.org
MIT License
108 stars 107 forks source link

This sentence no verb #181

Closed wwaites closed 10 years ago

wwaites commented 10 years ago

Well, not quite, but that famous quote from Douglas Hofstadter sums up the cognitive dissonance that is caused by some of the new language.

For example, the footer of the main web site says, "Content on this site, made by Open Knowledge, is licensed..." Well, Knowledge, Open or Otherwise didn't make the web site. People did.

As far as using it as the company name, most jurisdictions, though perhaps not England & Wales, forbid names like this and for good reason. It is too general and takes words that belong to everyone and claims ownership of them. This is not a nice thing to do.

Similarly with Open used as a noun as in "I am doing Open" or "We have been very successful at Open". This is not just grammar pedantry! Using Open as a noun is at best jargon and the same sentiment that has lead to the exorcising of acronyms could well apply here.

trickvi commented 10 years ago

@LaurieJ This is related to an issue that got brought up while creating the initial version of our website, what name should we use in the license (both the MIT license and the CC license). We settled on Open Knowledge but as @wwaites suggests a name like this can be forbidden in jurisdictions (and I don't know if it is in England. Should we be using a different name in legal licenses?

@wwaites, regarding this issue, then I don't see a big problem with the words Open Knowledge as long as we capitalise both words. That makes it obvious (to me at least) that we're not talking about open and knowledge in their distinct meaning, but Open Knowledge as a "thing".

This is kind of similar to "Red Hat" and to take an example from their website where some guy from Banco Azteca says in the front page carousel "I relied heavily on my Red Hat certifications to deliver real business value to my company".

Now we do know that there is no hat which happens to be red, that certifies people and we also know that there are now certificates wearing red hats in the delivery business, that's mostly just people in FedEx uniforms or UPS or whatever. So I think this is a very minor issue and we just have to be aware of Capitalisation of the words Open and Knowledge.

LaurieJ commented 10 years ago

*"Open Knowledge" is not our full legal name. (In fact, for almost all of our history, "Open Knowledge Foundation" was not our full legal name either

trickvi commented 10 years ago

Thanks for the clarification @LaurieJ I then assume we should update our software licenses to use our full name instead of the trading name. That is we do not need the full legal name in the CC license since that is about attribution and we want people to attribute us via our trading name, but for the copyright notice in the MIT license we should use the full legal name since that is about who holds the copyright.

I will update it.

trickvi commented 10 years ago

Content updated on /about/ page under the section Legal notice (added a ", trading as Open Knowledge," to better clarify why we all of a sudden use "The Open Knowledge Foundation" when using "Open Knowledge" everywhere else on the page.

License updated via aee3274f21904335aa1fd55fa5fee2d44c80aa4c

Closing the ticket as this has now been clarified and everything updated.

@wwaites I don't know if the Red Hat explanation was good enough (but I feel it is very similar) or if this ticket went in the direction you intended so just re-open if you have anything else to add.