From: Adam L. Beberg (beberg@mithral.com)
Date: Thu Jun 22 2000 - 17:36:05 PDT
On Thu, 22 Jun 2000, Ernest Prabhakar wrote:
> At the moment, the most interesting fact is that their new web site
> seems to have eliminated the word "Open Source" - do you think
> they're backing away from that?
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 (not involved
with them all going out of business, I mean the ones still in business)
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.
Some people are still pursuing the ideals behind (way way behind) "open
source" but you can't call it that anymore, just like you can't call
yourself a hacker in mixed company. 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.
Another term bites the dust...
We really should have a webcast funeral :)
- Adam L. Beberg
Mithral Communications & Design, Inc.
The Cosm Project - http://cosm.mithral.com/
beberg@mithral.com - http://www.iit.edu/~beberg/
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