From: Adam L. Beberg (beberg@mithral.com)
Date: Sat Jun 24 2000 - 08:52:57 PDT
On Fri, 23 Jun 2000, Kragen Sitaker wrote:
> 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).
Yeap, more good examples.
I'm talking strinctly about the term, and the perception of the term.
Lots of people are still working en mass on the same projects, but they
aren't calling it that any more. The term is poisoned.
> 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.
Yeap, open software is a good thing. I doubt you'd find a non-believer
here on FoRK.
> 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?
If you're meaning the same restrictions an RFC imposes, then yes. The
new licenses are more careful and clear with the "change if you want,
but it's not compliant anymore" language.
If you mean it won't have the "Open Source"(TM)(Copyright OSI) stamp
meaning it's complient to a set of rules, then yes again. The new dual
license isn't even a source code license anyway, so i'm not even sure
the rules _could_ be applied.
Personally I think OSI deserves a huge chunk of the blame for poisoning
the term. You can't codify good and evil in a set of 10 rules, only
religeons need to do that ;) Oh, wait, it is a religeon. Oops, "Open
Source"(TM) now appears to be 9 rules and a clause, hit that moving
target folks.
- 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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