A column entitled "Businesses Receptive to Open Source" published in the Business Section of the local rag -- the Trenton Times -- caught my eye last Monday. The column basically discussed the open source movement in nontechnical terms so that the average business person would be able to understand what it entailed. A very average article, on the whole, but it contained these rather humourous bits concerning Al "creator of the Internet" Gore:
Opening Paragraphs:
You know a computing buzz word has really arrived when politicians start finding excuses to use it. In declaring his campaign Web site to be "open source," Vice President Al Gore stumbled a bit over the latest geek-speak.
Gore might not be alone in his seeming confusion about the open source
movement, a hot trend that might seem a business oxymoron: free software.
<snip>
Closing Paragraphs:
"The basic idea behind open source is simple," write Eric Raymond of the Open Source Initiiative. "When programmers on the Internet can read, redistribute, and modify the source for a piece of software, it evolves. People improve it, people adapt it, people fix bugs."
Which brings us back to Al Gore and his "open source" web site. Web
page HTML code isn't secret, and can be viewed in any browser. Will the
Web development community rush to improve Gore's code? And if they do,
couldn't they then redistribute it to billbradley.com?