OSS Provides Opportunity, Challenge for Developing World

NewsForge has an interesting article looking at open source in the developing world. From the article: " Open source software and development can push governments of developing nations ahead in the world, but only if they participate as producers of the technology themselves, United Nations University (UNU) researchers say. While they say developing regions such as China, East Asia, India, and South America are among the biggest markets for open source software, UNU officials worry that there may be too few open source developers in those regions."

Comments

OSS means nothing

[yattaran]

Open Source Software means nothing other than the source is open. But that doesn't mean anything other that you can view the source code. It may still be under a completely unusable licence incompatible with free software (http://www.fsf.org/licensing/essays/free-sw.html) .

Free software (http://www.fsf.org/licensing/essays/free-sw.html) on the other hand states that your software is free (as in freedom and free speech) and that the source code is available.

Stop using the "open source" term, it means absolutely nothing.

Re:OSS means nothing

[danielk1982]

But that doesn't mean anything other that you can view the source code.

No. The accepted definition of Open Source Software (put forth by OSI) is that you can view, modify and redistribute sotfware.

It may still be under a completely unusable licence incompatible with free software (http://www.fsf.org/licensing/essays/free-sw.html) .

The 'free sotware' definition but forth by the fsf is nothing but double speak. It really is a hijacking of the word 'free' to push an agenda. Licenses such as the MPL (Firefox), CDDL, Apache, Eclipse Public and others are not compatible with GPL (i.e. fsf's definiton of 'software freedom') but everybit as 'free'. BSD and MIT licenses also don't fit the fsf definition yet I would argue give you more freedom.

Re:Most software is not sold to the public...

[synthespian]

Having the source code available to study, modify, fix etc., can only be helpful in education. Unless someone can explain how closed source provides such an opportunity.

Fallacy. You seem to imply there can be no situation like in the BSD scenario (or MPL, or Apache, or LPGL, etc.) where you have proprietary modification AND access to code.