openwashing

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openwashing is the antipattern of producing something non-open, or with non-open methods/maintenance, then claiming it is open, or marketing it as open, with perhaps superficial resemblance or motions that appear to make it open, but not open in practice, whether open standards, open source, open licensing, etc.

Classes of examples

• "Open APIs" - most so-called Open APIs have very restrictive or domineering Terms of Service that make them non-open in practice
• OERs-Many in the Open Educational Resource community believe educational institutions may remove faculty and resources and then replace with open content or third party vendors moentize open resources selling user data.

Examples in general

• schema.org is an example of openwashing of a proprietarily created and (still?) controlled effort. schema.org has done just enough openwashing to appear open to people who don't bother investigating or don't know the history to know that actually it was all invented by a small team (mostly one guy) at Google, forced upon other search engines, and still effectively controlled by Google, through motions of an open mailing list.
• ...

See Also

• https://openwashing.org/ - one summary, a bit narrowly focused on open source in particular
• Early 2009 reference and definition: http://michellethorne.cc/2009/03/openwashing/
• 2018-01-01 What Is ‘Open’? Openwashing and the Half-Truths About Openness
• 2014-12-03 Openwashing: adopter beware
• 2018-04-12 Can a For-Profit, Venture-Backed Company Keep OER Free—and Be Financially Sustainable?

  “Many textbook publishers are guilty of ‘openwashing’—pretending to take on the positive community aspects of open educational resources while profiting from access to their platforms,” CEO Mike Silagadze wrote in a blog post today.

• 2013-03-16 NYTimes: Open and Closed

  “openwashing,” as catchy as it sounds, only questions the authenticity of “open” initiatives; it doesn’t tell us what kinds of “openness,” if any, are worth pursuing. We must differentiate the many different types of “open.”

• 2018-01-04 ComputerWeekly: 20 years of the Open Source Initiative (OSI)

  define openwashing as the act of offering a certain amount of source code out as open but:

  1. keeping the cash cow code of the vendor’s projects proprietary and closed
  2. exploiting all commercial elements of project business for all they are worth and putting no discernible or definable hours into any so-called open projects
  3. offering no substantial ‘code commits’ to any project that is opened and no substantial ‘code commits’ to any related projects from other groups

  … so indeed, openwashing is an unpleasant neologism and the OSI seeks to avoid it […]

• 2017-11-20 Distilling Canvas LMS Accusations Of ‘Openwashing’
• 2017-08-29 PLOS Blog Absolutely Maybe: Bias in Open Science Advocacy: The Case of Article Badges for Data Sharing
  
• 2016-07-02 The Guardian: Beware the ‘empathy-washing’ of self-proclaimed caring capitalists

  “openwashing” for fake transparency pledges

• 2015-04-24 Forbes: If Software Is Eating The World, Then Open Source Will Chew It Up (And Swallow)

  The overt commercialization of many projects is a problem, the ‘openwashing’ of generally proprietary projects with one small element of open source is a problem and the wider growing up of open source to now fulfil its full potential is a challenge if it’s not a problem.

• 2015-01-16 Audrey Waters: What do we Mean by Open Education?
• 2014-12-03 How to Avoid Open Washing
• 2013-08-13 TechDirt: Extending The Spectrum Of Openness To Include The Moral Right To Share

  things have got to the point where "openwashing" -- the abuse of the term in order to jump on the openness bandwagon -- is a real problem

  

• 2013-10-02 The Battle for Open
• 2011-07-27 Openwashing – the new Greenwashing
• 2011-02-03 Readwrite: How to Spot Openwashing
• http://tantek.com/2017/303/t3/amp-openwashing-like-schema (tweet: https://twitter.com/t/status/925348152743481344)
  • ".@beep https://ethanmarcotte.com/wrote/seven-into-seven/
    & @adactio https://adactio.com/journal/13035
    I.e. #AMP is #openwashing not #openweb, similar to #schema before it.
    
    It has appearances or aspects of being open (e.g. with defensive statements like "non-google committers"), but in practice is proprietarily controlled/governed (free community labor for corporate leaders), and designed (perhaps unintentionally) to bias an otherwise seemingly open ecosystem towards a single company or small anti-competitive oligopoly in practice.
    
    Nevermind the #doublespeak of caching vs hosting, or placement within "search results" implying part of a page vs the more practically meaningful "SERP" (search engine results *page*) placement, regardless of styling as a horizontal carousel or vertical list.
    
    I still think an actually open alternative could be beneficial.
    
    Previously, previously, previously:
    * tantek.com/2017/261/t2/open-alternatives-googleamp
     * tantek.com/2017/262/t1/amp-yourself-worse-than-html
     * tantek.com/2017/262/t2/amp-worse-than-html-subset
     * tantek.com/2017/263/t1/open-html-subset-interacts-quickly
    * tantek.com/2015/280/t1/js-dr-amp-not-include-javascript
     * tantek.com/2015/280/t2/make-amp-smaller-ban-jsonld-schema-org
    
    More: https://indieweb.org/AMP" @Tantek Çelik October 30, 2017
• http://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Openwashing
• 2018-09-27 IODC18: Open Washing session / panel
• 2017 April: Technological Forecasting Social Change journal: Openwashing: A decoupling perspective on organizational transparency
• Related: "machinewashing" https://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2019/01/07/beware-corporate-machinewashing/IwB1GkAxBlFaOzfo8Wh0IN/story.html
• https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/openwashing