It’s easy to sit here and talk about the benefits of open source business (of which there are many), but what happens when it goes wrong or someone operates counter to the spirit? Something recently happened that worried me. On my Flickr account are a few photos of the team at work doing a pitch. They are innocuous pics of people plugging in laptops etc. I was looking one day at who has favourited my photos, which were all under a creative commons license, when i noticed that someone had favourited one of these boring pics. Intrigued I wandered over to their account and found they had indeed favourited mine but had also favourited a number of photos about boring office functions…becoming even more curious as to why they would do all boring office type pics, I decide to look at their own pics but found they had hidden them all (if they had any). So they were on Flickr and favouriting other people’s pics but they weren’t allowing people to see their own - this is pretty contrary to how these social software sites work.

Now heres the interesting bit. They had a pretty unique user name on their account so I googled it and found lots of references to this user name in forums and social spaces. What was even more interesting was that in each forum they had posted almost word for word the same message about there needing to be totally open access to peoples stuff so that businesses can share it, and almost no other follow up messages…now this was from someone who wouldn’t share their own Flickr pics. So going further I followed the IP addresses and found that the messages were from a company who seemed to put together business training materials…now this may or may not have been totally innocent but the question arose, were they using people’s pics in their business without even crediting them? Or was I just being paranoid?
I stress here that there have been no actual legal transgressions (and i may of course be just being paranoid) but it did instill in me the notion that in open source situations there have to be enforceable rules. There is no room for the wild west scenario of landgrabs and where companies or individuals indulge in unethical behaviour then there has to be some comeback. On the question of paranoia, none of it would have arisen if their flickr account had been open to view.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 4th, 2007 at 10:55 am and is filed under Richard Adams, opensource, social networks. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.