I'm the manager of a computer which runs SuSE and Gentoo linux. I often talk to customers about Open Source and Free Software. These are people often looking for a change to the world defined by Microsoft. These customer don't care if is say Open Source and Free Software, what they care is that the software is free. That no one is going to turn off the functionally every 12 months unless a fee is paid.

The other customer would be the programmer type unless they are a hobbyist there mostly affected by the market. What will someone pay them to do and what tools are needed. Well in this case Open Source and Free Software only matters if their employer give them a choice. The only real deviation from this trend would be say, those in the web programming.

For me the idea of Open Source 2.0 is just market bull. Call me wrong, but I often use the two term inter-changeably, but I always mean FREE as in free from all other choices with give the user no choice to bend over and squeal like a pig.

It is too bad Richard Stallman didn't do to Open Source what Open Source wants do to those that abuse their ideas. If Open Source is suffering from a dilution of their idea, maybe it is their own fault as the very idea was a slippery slope.

That is my humble 2cents worth

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DWW

Could we please have some examples of misuse of the term 'Open Source'? Call me ignorant but I'm not aware of the specific cases. Thanks.

I doubt changing the term to "Open Source 2.0" would really get anywhere other than adding even more confusion. Even with "Web 2.0" there is no clear definition of what it is and it is rather merely a widely accepted catch-all buzzword for the latest trends on the web.

In fact, I think pushing "Open Source 2.0" would be a bit silly.. just silly looking, because it relies so much on the shaky grounds of the "Web 2.0" term while trying to make it more strictly defined, which is a contradiction.

And you know what? I will continue calling it Free Software because I continue to believe that Open Source was a mistake, that it bastardized the presentation of the whole purpose of Free Software by deliberately opting to show only a part of the picture (show the practical benefits and *hide* the freedom) and yet we've seen a lot of people adopting Free Software because of freedom as well which kind of invalidates the whole point behind founding Open Source.

It's not too hard to say "free as in freedom" when talking about Free Software so I think that the ambiguity of the term "free" really didn't have to prompt such drastic measures as rebranding.

If we're in for alternative terms I'd rather accept something like "free source" because it involves the word free, but couples it with a word (source) with which it is not usually associated as free of cost. So basically saying "free source" may more easily be understood as free as in freedom source meaning that there are certain freedoms associated in addition to the availability of the source code.