From: Kragen Sitaker (kragen@pobox.com)
Date: Fri Jun 23 2000 - 19:33:46 PDT
Adam Beberg writes:
> The words "open source" now have the same conotations as say "hacker",
> "feminist", or "nazi"... Using it implies you're a communist
> license-freak in a jihad against the evils of all things capitalistic,
> and you go around raping women and clubbing baby seals when you're not
> too busy downloading pr0n and stealing MP3s.
>
> They aren't the only ones running screaming from the term "open source".
> I'm seeing quite a few people backing away from the term
Sure, and I suppose next you're going to tell us that the universe is a
single atom of Plutonium located in the center of your brain, right?
Among the communist license freaks still on jihads against capitalism:
- IBM (http://www.pc.ibm.com/us/netfinity/feature/weather.html ---
from Wednesday)
- SGI (there's a link "Open Source" on their home page)
- HP (http://www.e-services.hp.com/software/press_room/index.html --- a
press release from Wednesday of last week)
- Corel (opensource.corel.com)
- Apple (http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2000/june/20qtlive.html --- a
press release from Tuesday)
To be honest, AOL's most recent press release citing "open source" is
from April, so they could be considered to have backed away from the
term. Of course, they still have several hundred employees working on
Mozilla. I also looked on Oracle's site (couldn't find anything except
a JavaScript error message --- nothing at all, related to open source
or not) and the sites of Abit and Asus (nothing about open source and
not much about software).
> (not involved with them all going out of business, I mean the ones
> still in business)
Who, exactly, has been going out of business? The closest I can recall
a free-software business coming to going out of business is when
Cyclic.com's only full-time employee went to go work for Cygnus. Are
you talking about Corel?
> as it gets more and more like a religeon and more clearly not a way to
> make money. Not making money of course being all 7 deadly sins rolled
> into one in American culture.
I'm one of the religious nuts you're talking about here; I have
volunteered many hours of my free time getting free software installed
on the computers of strangers, for example. The open-source guys don't
talk about the ethical or moral aspects of free software. We
free-software guys have been talking about it since the early 1980s.
> I've avoided the terms for a while
> now, and it's never been on the Cosm site, because even a year ago this
> was coming. Even in my article about it I explicitly said not to use
> the term. Now we do dual licensing and things like that.
You never intended Cosm to be open source at all, as far as I can tell;
you always wanted to impose compatibility restrictions on modified
versions. Have I misunderstood?
-- <kragen@pobox.com> Kragen Sitaker <http://www.pobox.com/~kragen/> The Internet stock bubble didn't burst on 1999-11-08. Hurrah! <URL:http://www.pobox.com/~kragen/bubble.html> The power didn't go out on 2000-01-01 either. :)
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