News Source Goes Open Source

This is a really interesting development – a major news organisation has decided to go open source.  For those new to the term ‘open source‘ it means allowing people non-commercial access to the source that built the object in question (often the source code to build some software, for example Firefox) and allowing them to use this source to build new versions and modified version of the object.  It’s a really interesting approach to news and allows you to get the readers to help with the process:

The argument over the utility of open source has one more voter in the yes camp. This time, it’s the Journal Register Company, a U.S. newspaper chain with 170 publications.

Calling it the Ben Franklin Project, the company tried open source for a month. Things went so well it decided to make it permanent and company-wide for its 18 daily newspapers and their websites.

In a somewhat cutesy press release, the company declares its “independence from proprietary publishing systems.”

I co-wrote an article on open source for the Independent a while back and for that article and another one on wiki technology (as in Wikipedia type stuff) I wanted to also publish the source – the full interviews, all the links gathered etc, but sadly it did not happen 😦