FWIW, I can confirm Larry Rosen's suggestion that indeed L. Peter Deutsch and Aladdin Ghostscript likely invented the manipulative marketing approach of pre-announcing that proprietary software might someday be FOSS and/or making semi-binding public statements or licensing terms that backup that marketing approach. (At least, in my 30 years in this field, I've never seen an example of this that predated the one Larry mentioned.) Diachronic research in this area should definitely start there.
Seth quoted Karl Fogel writing: > > The paper will take no position in the paper on the desirability of DOSP; I'm sad (but also sadly not surprised) to see that OSI is not willing to outright criticize this model, since it is primarily a proprietary software model. Delayed FOSS is proprietary software, and it's not open source. I would have hoped the OSI would take that position, but it seems OSI is more neutral on proprietary software than against it these days? IMO, taking a “neutral” position on a practice that is clearly bad for consumers isn't really neutrality; it's merely tacit support of the incumbent authority. Sincerely, -- Bradley M. Kuhn - he/them _______________________________________________ The opinions expressed in this email are those of the sender and not necessarily those of the Open Source Initiative. Official statements by the Open Source Initiative will be sent from an opensource.org email address. License-discuss mailing list License-discuss@lists.opensource.org http://lists.opensource.org/mailman/listinfo/license-discuss_lists.opensource.org
