I marked this post from Berkman Fellow Ethan Zuckerman about 10 sources of information and services Jimmy Wales thinks will be free many months ago and am just now revisiting it.

This week’s eWeek column is about something that’s been bugging me for a while now. Computers do not play together very well. And this is going to – sooner or later – have political consequences. Why? Part of the problem…

Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, has been presenting audiences with a prediction and a challenge about the free culture movement: Ten Things that Will be…

wish us luck

Ethan Zuckerman documents a Jimmy Wale talk, looking at 10 things that will become free over the next 10-25 years, as in free of licensing, freely available, free to use, mix and repurpose. But these things won’be become free of…

A dozen things
I like this list. It’s definitely skewed a bit toward the wiki-world, and could be expanded, especially in software terms toward needed free projects. Open, transparent software for government use, for example.

For example, let’s assume the congressional budget office uses a particular software package to manage most of the nation’s budget. Now let’s assume that an open source project creates a package that matches this functionality, for free. Now, let’s take it one step further, and build in public, web-based access to any of the CBO’s data. Given that the software worked, and was free, the government would have a hard time not adopting it (cost-effectiveness regulations and all), and transparency would come along for the ride.

Now given, that’s pretty pipe-dreamy. But there’s more to free than education and reference information. There’s also the knowledge that’s hidden in institutions. In a free-focused world, we need to figure out ways to get that information out.

Wikibooks / WikiDictionary
One other possible reason for the rapid growth of Wikipedia vs. WikiBooks is simply its how widely useful the information is. More widely useful = more users = more content.

There’s also the relation between user and creator. After I’ve looked up a few entries on Wikipedia, I’ve found it useful – and I feel some sort of obligation to contribute to that knowledge. Since I’m a reasonably intelligent person with some bits of specialized knowledge, it’s likely I can contribute somewhere. With Wikibooks, the end users (students) aren’t the people who generally create the content, so that sense of shared use/creation never happens.

Now, this explanation doesn’t fly for WikiDictionary, but in that case, the type of knowledge is the limiting factor. I can really only contribute to WikiDictionary if I’m really confident in the meaning of a particular word, which effectively limits me to being a linguist or an instructor of a given language. Most people don’t have that sort of precise definition for the words they use. (I can’t count the number of times I’ve failed the “define x without using the word x” test) On Wikipedia, I just have to know about a particular topic. This makes it easier.

I think the best shot for Wikibooks is for some educational institution to give its full backing. Full backing means first providing a good seed of content to Wikibooks. But second and more importantly, the institution has to commit to using the Wikibooks-based textbooks for instructing its own classes. Without actual use, they’ll be textbooks that joeRandom school board/university is wary to take on. With the backing (and use) of a major institution, the ‘selling’ process gets much easier.

Google Maps
This is quite an interesting example. Effectively, Google has created a standard by being the first to the market with a good API. (ala some of Microsoft IE’s proprietary HTML extensions). But what makes this situation unique is Google’s “Don’t be Evil” motto.

Now whether or not Google is actually evil isn’t the issue. The issue is that once thousands of developers have created large apps with the Google Maps API, that API becomes a de-facto standard for GIS information online, and Google will have a hard time changing the licensing to something more “evil”. It’s obviously not a technical issue (this is Google, after all), but a social one. If the Maps API is entrenched, Google is smart enough to know that they’d have a PR backlash by trying to switch to a non-free license, or less-functional API. They’re also smart enough to know that rivals would be waiting with competing products in the case of such a slip up.

What you end up with is a commercial product, extended by the community beyond its original design, that is semi-transparent and free to use. Best of all, the product is sustained by social stigma and a bit of competition. While this surely isn’t open source, it’s not business as usual.

In a way, it’s almost open-source coercion. It will be interesting to see if future APIs emulate this fate, or try to avoid it.