Outside of fighting against the poorly named Open Source Definition and their gatekeepers, what are important challenges in open source? Most people still can't open their sources and collaborate on them, most people still don't consider them when sharing resources.
We lack tools and infrastructure to share resources and their sources appropriately, it is a considerable barrier to collaboration and reusability in most areas.
In open education people do not really consider the release of their sources with open educational resources (OER), platforms focus more on end resources such as the pdf. In a platform like LibreTexts, there is no way to suggest basic modification through some sort of pull request.
Hard to find collaborative platforms to develop OER, people ending up on software forge like GitHub which creates huge entry barriers.
Despite the right given by open licenses, it would be hard for trainers and teachers to modify OER without sources. There is no accessible way to collaborate on open source educational resources for teachers and trainers.
More broadly, we have no accessible and versionable tools for text collaboration.
The lack of infrastructure to host sources appropriately which could enable collaboration is mostly the same for all open models such as in open hardware or open science.
In science, you still don't have the technical ability to build on top of each other work partly because of this lack of control over sources. Science standards are still poor, they are using pdf.
We deeply lack open software which are enabler of openness in these various fields, infrastructure becoming increasingly an important topic. Next to it, culture and skills improvements should favor more mature approaches.
What are challenges for open source ? At least to help science and education to embrace digital technologies and this ability to use, modify and share resources.
The challenge of the knowledge.
Outside of it, led by the Open Source Initiative, there are important concerns within the open source community to defend the Open Source Definition in order to protect evil usage and the ability of big corp to take resources destructively from smaller companies.
Please reject people who try to bring ethics and protect themselves against big monopolies, a major cause to keep open source spirit and beauty ❤️
We can rely on the Open Source Initiative to be the word police with all the accuracy of a brave policeman, in parallel it might be interesting to have an organisation to help develop open source to support science and education.
P.S.: Open source have been used in the broad sense of "sources of digital resources", not restricted to a tiny percentage of open source resources with libertarian licensing inside software only.
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