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Welcome to Open Source 2.0

Jun 22, 2007  By Glyn Moody

There is no doubt that 3 February 1998 was a historic day. For it was then, at a meeting in Mountain View, that a small group led by Eric Raymond came up with the term “open source

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Free or Open

DWW's picture
Submitted by DWW (not verified) on Fri, 06/29/2007 - 20:20.

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

--
DWW

OSI doesn't want to debate

Jim Thompson's picture
Submitted by Jim Thompson (not verified) on Tue, 06/26/2007 - 22:01.

Russ Nelson configured the email system on his machine (which hosts the OSI lists, including the board list) such that email from me is silently dropped.

He did this on purpose, with the express intent of cutting me off from the OSI board, because I endorse the Free Software viewpoint.

Please provide examples.

Mike Parin's picture
Submitted by Mike Parin (not verified) on Tue, 06/26/2007 - 04:49.

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.

Well, for example

Glyn Moody's picture
Submitted by Glyn Moody on Tue, 06/26/2007 - 05:28.

CentricCRM calls itself "The most advanced open source CRM, but its licence says:

You may use, copy, modify, and make derivative works from the code for internal use only.

You may not redistribute the code, and you may not sublicense copies or derivatives of the code, either as software or as a service.

which isn't open source in the OSI sense.

There are others.

But Open Source 0.0 is over fifty years old

jpmcc's picture
Submitted by jpmcc (not verified) on Mon, 06/25/2007 - 06:57.

Stripped of the philosophical baggage which it later acquired, open source as a means of improving software quality and saving development costs dates back to at least August 1955, with the SHARE project on the IBM 704. Maybe that was Open Source 0.0?

Good point

Glyn Moody's picture
Submitted by Glyn Moody on Mon, 06/25/2007 - 07:35.

Open Source 0.0 - I like it.

must we succumb?

Anonymous's picture
Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Sun, 06/24/2007 - 14:37.

If one could reach escape velocity, stop ,turn around and sit down on a lunar door stoop,and look back at our ionosphere-wrapped "space island'
one could not ignore the contrast between the relative fixed geographic features and the (my unsophisticated take) seemingly blind rush toward convergence via consolidation.Castle Redmond, it seems, exhibits the expected behavior. Problem is with each co-op or buy out a unique culture is lost. Resulting in the loss of once contributing vocabularies of expression. Reaching millions with the concept of free computing means educating/marketing. Redefining "free" is a good place to start.
The freedom we currently embrace unconsciously is, sadly, one of conspicuous consumption beneath corporate skirts.

I doubt changing the term to

libervisco's picture
Submitted by libervisco (not verified) on Sat, 06/23/2007 - 05:09.

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.

I like the idea but what about the acronym?

Gustav's picture
Submitted by Gustav (not verified) on Fri, 06/22/2007 - 10:01.

I absolutely like the idea and will definitely start talking about Open Source 2.0 just to make my point clear about FLOSS because everything is called OSS nowadays and I hate that, but I don't know if the name will stick because of the acronym.

How do we write the short name? OS2? Won't work I'm afraid...

Regards,
Gustav

re: > How do we write the short

Roy Schestowitz's picture
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz (not verified) on Fri, 06/22/2007 - 22:39.

> How do we write the short name? OS2? Won't work I'm afraid...

Neither will "Free software". People still associate "free" with cost.

I just have the crazy ideas...

Glyn Moody's picture
Submitted by Glyn Moody on Fri, 06/22/2007 - 10:26.

...I leave the marketing to other people.

That is actually a good

Bjorn Solstad's picture
Submitted by Bjorn Solstad (not verified) on Sun, 06/24/2007 - 10:42.

That is actually a good point. It's not always about marketing or how "brandable" an idea is. Sometimes it is purely about if the idea is good or not :)

It works fine if you think

Seth Brown's picture
Submitted by Seth Brown (not verified) on Mon, 06/25/2007 - 16:13.

It works fine if you think of it as 'Freedom Software' or 'Liberty Software'.

Another problem with the term 'Open Source' is that only techies have a clue what 'source' is, at all. It creates another marketspeak term that obscures what it pretends to explain.

Hehe! I did not think about

Bjorn Solstad's picture
Submitted by Bjorn Solstad (not verified) on Thu, 06/28/2007 - 18:18.

Hehe! I did not think about that actually. A VERY good point :P

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