Wednesday July 25, 2007 Redefining Open Source?
There was a panel today at OSCON on Who gets to decide what open source means and it reminded me of experiences at Sun when I started in my current role. I kept meeting with marketing folks who thought "open source" was purely descriptive, and that they could define it any way that suited them. Each time I'd tell them no, that's not what Sun does, Sun only calls things "open source" when they are licensed using licenses approved by the Open Source Initiative as complying with the Open Source (License) Definition.
It's true that there's more to open source than that, but the overwhelming consensus of what Eben Moglen called the "republic of open source" is that a conforming license is a baseline requirement. They'd argue for a while, but in the end it always came down to this: if open source didn't mean something already, you'd not want to use the phrase for marketing. I didn't let the marketeers mess with it and neither should you.
Posted by webmink
( Jul 25 2007, 04:44:12 PM PDT )
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links for 2007-07-25
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I just signed and would invite all my British readers to consider this petition. Access to this resource should be available for all license-fee payers, and there should not be a requirement to use a particular commercial product.
Posted by webmink
( Jul 25 2007, 01:24:09 AM PDT )
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