Fully open content

In the spirit of the iron law of convexity, we assert that fully open content is preferable over partially open content. Or fully open discontent, for that matter. To put it simply, we have just identified "open" as a "good." In the present author's own opinion, the fact that open is a good is not good news. This should not deter any pubwan participant from treating openness as a good in their personal life, as the pubwan movement as a whole is "governed" (for [temporary, we hope] lack of another word) by a neutrality principle.

By the way, we apologize for the use of "we" in pubwan wiki. We are a faction of one. If we were a read write wiki, we would be able to implement parliamentary procedure. If that were the case, the words "I second that motion" would enable us to be part of a faction larger than ourselves.

At manifold.net, I came across an interesting discussion of what fully open content means. The author also added a new word to my vocabulary... webstacle. I am quite glad this word has been invented, as I've been looking for such a word. A webstacle is a web-resident obstacle, specifically an obstacle to fully open content. A webstacle provides information while denying "meta-information." The example at manifold.net is offering a raster image of a map in lieu of a tabular representation of the collection of geocoded points from which the map is derived. A print-media analogy can be made by comparing a (typical) catalog with a price list. The latter, being tabular and systematic (spreadsheet-like), is more informationally powerful, and is inevitably more closely guarded and more exclusively distributed. It seems sometimes that the technology of webstacles comprises the lion's share of the technology of e-commerce. pub wan is proposed primarily as a technology for the (lawful!) reverse engineering and monkeywrenching of webstacles, in meatspace as well as online. Like manifold.net, the pubwan movement is not (actively) opposed to the existence of proprietary data or metadata, but it is emphatically opposed to the nonexistence of nonproprietary data and especially metadata. The means by which this objective can be attained is quite simple...volunteer information!