Quoting Luis Villa ([email protected]): > Karl, Richard, anyone else: any thoughts on this?
Just talking around the subject for a moment, there has in the past been a vague and informal concept of 'open' involving inspectable aka viewable source code aka source-available code, and also a much more specific 1980s and Sun Microsystems concept of 'open systems'. 'Open systems' was a marketing codephrase for *ix-based computing's advantages accruing from standardised programming interfaces, with an implied suggestion of more-interoperable hardware interfaces to peripherals, and encouragement of third-party software. The usual comparison was towards IBM-standard computing's much greater lock-in at various levels. None of this had anything to do with licensing, let alone articulating the right to fork, or the right to reuse for any purpose without additional fee. Engel says he wishes to add to the FAQ to address "the ambiguity in the use of the term 'open source' as well". I appreciate his effort, but agree that ambiguity arises from the word 'open', but _not_ when used in the phrase 'open _source_'. Context is everything. People who say that the phrase 'open source' is ambiguous merely because people have often used the word 'open' to mean other things in the general context of software are missing the point that the specific phrase 'open _source_' has a quite specific meanin, established through overwhelming weight of usage since the 1998 OSI founding. Seems to me that Engel's commendable draft might be improved on in that area, so: The term "open" applied to software source code is sometimes used to imply source code being merely inspectable or visible or available, as in the phrases "open computing" and "open systems" that were adopted by proprietary Unix companies' marketing efforts in the 1980s. By contrast, OSI's term "open source", as detailed in the Open Source Definition, specifically entails not mere inspection access but also conveying to recipients the perpetual and irrevocable right to fork covered code and use it freely without additional fee. _______________________________________________ License-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://projects.opensource.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/license-discuss
