Congratulations on publishing the book. I was browsing it casually today,
hoping to find material that the Open Source Initiative could reuse but I
found a glaring mistake in the first chapter. In "What is Open Source"
https://runestone.academy/ns/books/published/opensource/sec_oss_what_it_is.html?mode=browsing
the book starts saying
Open Source Software (OSS) is software for which the source code is
open for anyone to view
This is very wrong, especially since you capitalize Open Source Software.
That's a term of art, universally recognized by industry and even by
legislators around the world as "computer software that is released under a
license in which the copyright holder grants users the rights to use,
study, change, and distribute the software and its source code to anyone
and for any purpose" That's the Wikipedia wording, but you'll find many
similarly worded definitions in US and EU guidelines and regulations.
Being able to simply view the code has never been a value of Open Source
Software.
Later the chapter says "A related type of open source software is Free and
Open Source Software (FOSS) which offers additional freedoms" which is also
wrong. FOSS is just another term for OSS. The wikipedia entry
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_and_open-source_software> offers more
resources, and you'll note how the definition of what is FOSS is basically
identical to that of OSS.
I really hope these issues can be fixed so that students get a better
understanding of the Open Source ecosystem.
Regards,
Stef
On Mon, Sep 25, 2023 at 11:13 PM Jan Pearce <pear...@berea.edu> wrote:
> Thanks so much for this note, Heidi! I am very proud of the book, but also
> sincerely want to invite improvements from this community. If it doesn't
> have the content you need, please consider posting an issue at
> https://github.com/pearcej/opensource/issues and/or a pull request at
> https://github.com/pearcej/opensource. (I am currently using my students
> to post issues and issue pull-requests, so there are a number of issues,
> but I hope you can see that I am being very responsive!
>
> Jan
> <https://github.com/pearcej/opensource/issues>
> Issues · pearcej/opensource <https://github.com/pearcej/opensource/issues>
> Open Source: What it is and How to Contribute. Contribute to
> pearcej/opensource development by creating an account on GitHub.
> github.com
>
>
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Dr. Jan Pearce | Professor of Computer and Information Science
>
> Berea College | Berea, KY| | (859) 985-3569
>
> www.berea.edu/csc/faculty-and-staff/dr-jan-pearce
>
>
> ------------------------------
> *From:* tos <tos-boun...@teachingopensource.org> on behalf of Heidi Ellis
> <heidi.el...@wne.edu>
> *Sent:* Monday, September 25, 2023 4:05 PM
> *To:* tos@teachingopensource.org <tos@teachingopensource.org>
> *Subject:* [TOS] New open source text book!!!
>
> [EXTERNAL SENDER]
>
> Hi Folks,
>
> I would like to draw your attention to a new text book by our own Jan
> Pearce titled "Open Source: What It Is and How to Contribute". This is
> an open source textbook hosted on Runestone:
>
>
> https://runestone.academy/ns/books/published/opensource/meta_frontmatter.html?mode=browsing
>
> Congratulations Jan on the publication of your text!
>
> Heidi
> _______________________________________________
> tos mailing list
> tos@teachingopensource.org
> http://lists.teachingopensource.org/mailman/listinfo/tos
> TOS website: http://teachingopensource.org/
> _______________________________________________
> tos mailing list
> tos@teachingopensource.org
> http://lists.teachingopensource.org/mailman/listinfo/tos
> TOS website: http://teachingopensource.org/
>
_______________________________________________
tos mailing list
tos@teachingopensource.org
http://lists.teachingopensource.org/mailman/listinfo/tos
TOS website: http://teachingopensource.org/
