ENTREPRENEURIAL TRAITS

CULTURE

One example of open culture entrepreneur is Richard Stallman. He is who was working with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology resigned February 1984 and launched the GNU project. In 1989, he created the General Public License that gave interested researchers not only the ability to have access to the source code, but also to reproduce, modify, and distribute it.

However, the movement split in two different directions. Stallman and the Free Software Foundation, created in 1985, adopted a social dimension by putting the emphasis on knowledge sharing, while Eric Raymond and his Open Source Initiative (OSI), created in 1998 stressed the possibilities for technological development opened up by the fact that developers could freely use their predecessors’ work.

Richard Stallman and Lawrence Lessing developed tools such as Creative Commons licensing and “copy left” licenses to help bring about a more open culture. Although open science has many parallels to the open culture movement, science faces a unique set of forces that inhibit open sharing. That means that tools such as Creative Commons licenses, which have been tremendously effective in moving to a more open culture, do not directly address the principal underlying challenge in science. Although open science can learn a lot from the open culture movement, it also requires new thinking.