Open knowledge

Content sourced from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

Open knowledge, or free knowledge, is knowledge you can use, reuse, and share for free, without legal, social, or technical barriers. Advocates outline principles and methods for making knowledge open. It is connected to open source and the Open Definition, which grew from the Open Source Definition.

The idea might seem new, but it’s old. For example, a copy of the Diamond Sutra from around 868 AD in China carried a dedication for universal free distribution. In the Enlightenment era, Denis Diderot allowed others to reuse his Encyclopédie material as long as he could reuse theirs.

In the early 20th century, the German Social Democratic Party debated intellectual property. Karl Kautsky argued that intellectual production (ideas) should be treated differently from material production, part of a view that ideas can be shared more freely than physical goods.

With the rise of the public Internet in the 1990s, copying and sharing information became much easier worldwide. The saying information wants to be free became a rallying cry against commercial barriers that stifle creativity. Open knowledge has grown as more people share, improve, and spread information, building communities and projects around free access to knowledge.