'Open Source Media' vs 'Open Source Media, Inc'

Karl writes "Last week OSM (Open Source Media) launched to what some are calling an odd start. Most notably naming a controversy has ensued with Christopher Lydon's public radio show Open Source, a production of Open Source Media, Inc.."

Communist Propaganda Media

[Pampusik]

Anybody else notice that most of their "current headlines" come from China's propaganda agency, Xinhua News Agency?

Odd start indeed...

Full of themselves

[Army of 1 in 10]

Despite the current controversy over their choice of a name, they downplay it. Take this excerpt from their website:

Some OSM readers have expressed consternation over our new company name, so please let us take a moment to explain--in the spirit of full disclosure--the story of its origin. At the outset, we formed a company under the masthead "Pajamas Media," after that now-famous remark about bloggers being "just a bunch of people sitting around in their pajamas." Then, as the idea for the company grew, we cast about for a new name that would reflect our ethos long after the joke grew old. Some of the unsuccessful names rejected along the way were "Alpha Media" and "Jellyfish Media," so don't be so hard on us about "OSM"--it could have been worse.

Not only did they launch themselves with an anti-open source attitude (prohibitive copyright terms [phillyfuture.org] which they've since removed from their privacy policy), they didn't do a simple google search to make sure that no confusion would occur as a result of their name selection. OSM should have stuck with "Pajamas Media"... there's nothing wrong with that and it pokes reverent fun at those who shrug off bloggers.

It's about the software, stupid

[0xdeadbeef]

Oh, wow, we've never seen this before. A bunch of right-wingers attempt to co-opt something "hip" and "cool" and totally out of context in the effort to help sell their message. I'm shocked, shocked, that they would do such a thing.

Re:Communist Propaganda Media

[maxzilla]

Its pretty ironic for them to do that, especially considering China's history with banning bloggers. maybe they never noticed xinhua's general slant, or maybe its all because the news tips seem user sent. could their bloggers be in support of the PRC? either way I think its a cheap attempt to use a name to support a cast of second rate bloggers...

Re:Open Source - just good name

[linforcer]

How about all those Gentoo Linux users that have (nearly) everything on their systems built from source? (like me)

Re:OSM Is Chinese Communist Party Mouthpiece

[meringuoid]

It's really come to something when propaganda from the Chinese Communist Party is considered right-wing by Americans.

Betrayed the Revolution a bit, haven't we, comrades?

Re:Communist Propaganda Media

[Zeinfeld]

Its pretty ironic for them to do that, especially considering China's history with banning bloggers. maybe they never noticed xinhua's general slant, or maybe its all because the news tips seem user sent. could their bloggers be in support of the PRC? either way I think its a cheap attempt to use a name to support a cast of second rate bloggers...

Or maybe the whole outfit is nothing but a front to promote wingnut propaganda for some corporate interests that have reasons for making nice with Bejing.

It might just be a mistake in configuring their moreover feed, but their terms of use which try to prohibit quoting or satire are not.

The site appears to be a carbon copy of the Huffington Post, only with right wing pundits instead of left and minus the reader comments. They have missed their moment for that, there is no shortage of right wing portal blogs without comments. What there is a growing shortage of is right wing fanatics wanting to endlessly debate why George W. Bush is absolutely right on everything.

What would make a lot more sense would be to set up a straight news and politics blog which does not have an eggregious tilt to either side. The right wing blogs play the Fox news game of pretending to be straight while delivering GOP talking points of the day verbatim. The left wing blogs make no bones about being partisan, the stated purpose of DailyKos is to campaign for Democratic candidates, Americablog makes no bones about being gay rights activism.

If you have any doubt about the right wingnut slant here just read the blogroll. Americablog? Kos? Huffington Post? Crooks and Liars? Nope. How about the commercial blogs, Salon? OK Slate, official blog of the WaPo? Nope, Nope. But pretty much every right wingnut blog you can imagine.

The cleverest thing Matt Drudge did was to put links to right and left wing media and blogs onto his home page. A lot of people still use him as a portal because the links are comprehensive. Of course that started back in the days when Drudge thought he could be a bipartisan bottomfeeder

So given the rest of the nonsense I don't see anything suprising about the deliberately misleading use of 'open source'. Clearly OSM is not open source, they don't even allow fair use of their stuff! (Like they have a choice).

Christopher Lydon appears to be refering to a different, older definition of 'open source', a term used by journalists that means publicly available information, like minutes of congress, stuff published in other media, etc. But the wingnuts are clearly using the term in the geek sense.

Re:Communist Propaganda Media

[superdude72]

Anybody else notice that most of their "current headlines" come from China's propaganda agency, Xinhua News Agency?

It's funny because they're right-wing and presumably anti-communist, but I expect this is simply lack of competence on their part. Xinhua is available with a lot of newsfeed packages and is very, very cheap. Might even be free. We used to get Xinhua when my company subscribed to a newsfeed a few years ago.

Still, if they doing any filtering of their newsfeeds I wouldn't expect they'd let Xinhua flood everything like that.

Long before "Open Source" meant software....

[N8F8]

Long before "Open Source" meant software is was in widespread use in the military intel community to refer to publicly available information such as news and publications. In fact, it is still used that way.

Re:"Open Source" buzzword

[AuMatar]

At work the managers have been talking about an open source repository of software at work. When I asked them what license it would bbe under, it turned out to be proprietary- it was going to be open only to internal developers (in other words, it was a place to share code withing the company). Still a good idea, but calling it open source is asking for confusion.

But yup, when the PHBs start to redefine the term, its now a buzzword.