How Open is Open Source Really?

jg21 writes to tell us that several industry leaders have chimed in with a response to Nat Torkington's recent piece "Is 'Open Source' Now Completely Meaningless". In the original piece Torkington raised the question of whether the term "open source" had lost any meaning because of companies that use the label yet largly restrict user interaction. Sun's Simon Phpps chimed in by stating: "I see open source as a term relevant to the way communities function and I'd support the reunification of the terms 'Free' and 'open source' around the concept of Free software being developed in open source communities. On that basis it's not dead."

Comments

Amen!

[drinkypoo]

I'm utterly tired of people not involved with a movement trying to redefine it. Open Source has been around for a lot longer than Free Software. In fact, it used to be the norm in a lot of areas.

Re:Open Source means you get the code, that's it

[morgan_greywolf]

Except that you don't get to define what open source means. The Open Source Initiative has that luxury. IIRC, they went to great lengths to differentiate Open Source and Free Software as two distinct entities. Open Source means you get the code and nothing more. No guarantee that you can redistribute... You just contradicted yourself. You might want to go and read the Open Source Definition, which does state that if a license is to be OSI certified, it must allow modification and redistribution under the same license.

Don't be confused!

[SpaceLifeForm]

Open source != Free Software

GPL software is Free, as in libre.

Open source is not necessarily Free, as in libre.

Re:Open Source means you get the code, that's it

[liliafan]

I used to work for a web development company that advertised themselves as "the opensource web company".

Their idea of how they were an opensource company was because they used php to develop code, and, because when a site was written they gave the client ownership of the code.

No matter how much we employees tried to explain that didn't make us an opensource company the powers that be refused to listen. It was made worse by the fact that the president of the company was invited to DC to testify on the benefits of opensource.

Our contracts even stated that code developed in our own time was the property of the company, and the company policy was that no code developed could be released to the opensource community at large.

It can be really frustrating to have such a loose term as 'opensource' where a company can choose to interpret it in such a way as to benefit them and no one else, or companies that simply fail to understand the concept.

reunification

[forsetti]

How about "free" + "open" = "frepen"? (FREH-pen)

Have you tried that new frepen software?

That's the best frepen software I've ever used!

That frepen software frepped my freppy frep, and now I'm frepping frepped!

Re:Open Source means you get the code, that's it

[CastrTroy]

This comes down to the question of just how open do you have to be. Some people say GPL isn't enough, because it restricts how you can redistribute the code, and only think that BSD like licenses are really open source. Seems to me like your employer was trying to do the right thing, but giving the source code to the people who bought the program, but didn't want to have the code available to everyone, just those who had paid for the product. It's just another level of open source. It may not be as open as GPL or BSD, but it's way more open than MS Windows, where you don't get any option to view or change the source at all. Even MS has stuff they tout as open source, called shared source, but that's about as least open as you get, while still getting to look at the code.

Not much to say

[T.E.D.]

For those who don't wanna bother to RTFA, he starts off by complaining about a specific company claiming to use OSS when its software isn't downloadable, only to have to post this correction:

(update: Vyatta source is in git, though in my defense you can't find this out from their downloads page only the wiki. Their entire product is GPL, so they're as open source as they come. I apologize for misfiring)

This is in paragraph one of a 6 paragraph article. Not a good start.

There is one genuine arguing point, where someone named "Tim" tries to claim that certain software is cool because it embraces and extends Postgres to make it Oracle compatible. Its a silly claim though. If you ditch Oracle for someone else's proprietary Oracle look-alike, what exactly are you gaining? Certainly nothing an Open Source or Free Software advocate cares about.

who invented open source?

[falconwolf]

Actually, SCO [slashdot.org] (back when it was called Caldera) invented Open Source back in 1996 [google.com]. Yes, that's before the OSI thing, though after the foundation of the FSF.

The Tech Model Railroad Club of MIT had open source software as early as the 1960s and early 1970s beating out SCO by a long shot. The first computer game, Spacewar, came out in 1962 as a result of many programmers' contributions in an open manner. They used to compeat to see who could come up with a nifty hack, something that was considered impossible, never thought of, or was able to shave a few lines out of a program. Those programmer were amoung the first computer hackers and followed the Hacker ethic.

Falcon