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 "encourages competition. Open wins,’ he once proclaimed in an e­ssay – ­its luster has only intensified. Profiting from the term’s ambiguity, O’Reilly and his collaborators ­likened the ‘openness’ of open source software to the ‘openness’ of the academic enterprise, markets, and free speech. ‘Open’ thus could mean virtually anything."

For Morozov, O’Reilly’s c­o-​­option of the term allowed him to ally it to economics, which the market found more palatable, allowing O’Reilly and many in the software movement to ‘look political while advancing an agenda that had very little to do with politics’. As we saw in Chapter 1, openwashing suggests that there is market capital now in proclaiming open credentials, and ambiguity around the term facilitates this.

In Chapter 2, I set out a brief history of openness in ­education, but even this has political connotations. Such accounts of open education usually have one of two starting points. The first option is to take the founding of the Open University. Lane (2009) contends, ‘The discourse around the role of openness in higher education can be said to have seriously started with the inception of the United Kingdom Open University (UKOU) in 1969.’ The second, alternative, starting point for history is that of the open source movement, which is what Wiley and Gurell (2009) use, while admitting, ‘Histories are difficult to write for many reasons. One reason is the difficulty of determining where to begin telling the ­story – ­for there is never a true starting point to a tale woven of people, events and ideas.’ The choice of ­starting point will have an influence on the type of interpretation of open education put forward: the OU-​­based one may suggest a university and student focused approach, whereas the open source one might indicate a more technological and licence driven perspective.