The New York Times's Open Source ProjectThe New York Times's Open Source Project

Newspapers are either a dying breed or a changing breed, depending on who you talk to. The New York Times wants to adapt, not go extinct, and one of the little ways they're adapting involves a software tool they're releasing as an open-source application for their fellow news organizations -- or anyone else, really.

The app in question is the Document Viewer, which allows third-party documents (court records, for instance) to be attached and published along with a news story that involves said documents. According to a Mediabistro.com piece about the Times's Viewer project, it's set to be released as an open source app, and to be reworked in ways to allow both news staffers and readers to add annotations and comments directly on the pages of the documents.

The concept is great, especially since any news organization worth both its salt and pepper understands how important primary documentation is. But two other things come to mind.

The first is the mechanics of the reader app itself -- specifically, the bit about allowing readers to add comments. I hope the comment mechanism they use is something that can be tamed by the admins to allow the signal to stand out from the noise. There's been any number of other "meta-comment" systems out there, and they have all suffered from the same exact issue. I suspect their solution is nothing more than to force moderation by the owners, but really, I haven't seen a better way to do it yet.

The second, and more crucial, was sparked by this sentence from the piece:

That's all going to depend entirely on what kind of licensing the Times uses to release this thing. If they use a license model which allows people to keep changes to themselves (e.g., GPLv2), then guess what -- people aren't going to hesitate to do so, and they're going to have no one to blame but themselves.

If they want the "open source spirit" of the project to be respected, then they need to do the smart thing and pick the right license -- not cross their fingers and hope really hard that other news-industry people will be just as idealistic as they are. (Riiight.)

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