newspeak

via Born-Digital Access Research Summary – Google Docs.

Archives are increasingly digital; they are also mostly out of the public sector. The technology for these, along with that for modern libraries, uses both open and closed software, and it’s not clear which license and community programme is in the advance. There’s also an odd epistemological dissonance among open source communities: Most developing as members of well-known open source projects seem unaware of the Digital Asset Management side of open source, including the quite well-known (in these circles) Fedora Commons, short for Flexible Extensible Digital Object Repository Architecture. (Fedora, the Red Hat sponsored project, applied for trademark status in 2003, by which time Fedora–the DAM–had been around for a while. According to Wikipedia, Cornell and UVA “formally disputed the request,” but all parties agreed that Fedora (Linux OS) and Fedora (DAM) could both use the same name as long as it was clear enough which was which.

Of course, that does not explain why there’s this epistemological wall. Other issues at stake, not the least being adherence to local culture, to a project or community’s or company’s identity. But this kind of isolationism is hardly unique or new to Fedora Project.