Re: What is Open Source?

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From: Dave Winer (dave@userland.com)
Date: Fri Sep 15 2000 - 16:15:15 PDT

Oy. If only you knew.

We ship a lot of source in our "closed source" product.

Wouldn't it be nice if people avoided putting labels on each other?

A good way to avoid misunderstandings.

Dave

----- Original Message -----
From: "Charles S. Kerr" <charles@skywalker.ou.edu>
To: "Dave Winer" <dave@userland.com>
Cc: <FoRK@xent.ICS.UCI.EDU>
Sent: Friday, September 15, 2000 4:14 PM
Subject: Re: What is Open Source?

>
> > I think terminology is as important as license agreements. I am not a
> > "closed-source developer", a term that I consider perjorative and
negative.
> > I create both commercial and open source software. The least interesting
> > aspect of my commercial software is the source that I don't release.
>
> "closed-source" isn't pejoriative or negative; it's a fact. My day job
> is closed source too. They're not mutually exclusive states. <shrug>
> Anyway there was no offense meant so for the purposes of my original
letter
> just replace it with "someone who hadn't been closely watching the free
> software developments on Unix in the pre-Linux 90's". :)
>
> I thought it might be interesting to you & FoRK because
>
> (1) With all the anti-MS sentiment the 98%ers work up, it's easy to
> forget that tC&tB was written as an alternative to Open Source
Cathedral
> projects, not anti-commercial-software. (egcs vs. gcc, linux vs. hurd)
>
> (2) Your DaveNet kind of mixes the Bazaar & Open Source when you say that
> Open Source is where anyone can check in changes, etc. which is like
> a distorted Bazaar model. You rightly toss the hype aside, but you
> conclude there's not much difference. But between what?
Cathedral-style
> open source and cl^Hommercial software? That takes us full circle to
> Unixland circa 1996, before tC&tB hit. So, maybe commercial software
> is like 386BSD, or egcs, or the hurd, but is that a good thing? :)
>
> > Now that that's out of the way, I like your story, what project are you
> > managing in a bazaar-like way?
>
> I don't know that I"d hold it up as a poster child of the model,
> since it works better with more eyes & my project is of limited
> interest, but it's the GNOME newsreader "Pan".
>
> cheers,
> Charles

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