Your post is just astounding, a perfect example of 'if you're not with me you're against me' posturing, backed up with a healthy amount of insults and finished off with veiled assertions that I'm paid to "redefine" terminology for Microsoft's benefit. You've failed to actually address my point, which is that "open source" as a combination of words already suggests a definition that the OSI has been and is trying to extend. When you're trying to work out who is redefining the term open source, I suggest you try looking at the group who tried to trademark it.
In the meantime, I suggest you do some research on how the English language has evolved over the last hundred years or so for an idea on why just saying "we've defined it as this" is not enough, and I can only agree with you when you say that arbitrarily redefining a term to fit what a small subsection of the population wants is idiocy. Hell, it was exactly the point I was trying to make in the first place.
However, there are still a lot of companies who are heavily invested in Microsoft technology to the point where it's cheaper to pay the fee and vote for OOXML than to think about retraining in other specifications.
I wish I hadn't written that line, because it did exactly what I was worried it would do - which was distract from my main point.
I understand that it fails on those guidelines, but that's all they are. They're not laws, they're not immutable, and I definitely don't have to agree with them.
You can use it wrongly, as can MS, but pretending that you can decide, against everyone else, what a term means, is a fault that lies with you, not everyone else.
Hypocrisy, thy name is node 3. I've told you that the prevailing attitude among friends and coworkers (and we do deal with this stuff a lot in my job) is that open source means the source is available. In your own words, it is not for you to tell me I am wrong.
PJ has a history of misrepresenting various pieces of evidence, especially regarding Microsoft. For example, take PJ's take on OOXML compatibility:
"17MB (around 122,000) of invalidity messages" in the strict test; less in a "transitional" model, meaning one no one on the planet will be using, since the entire point of the BRM was to fix stuff and none of those fixes are yet incorporated into Microsoft Office 2007. And by the time they are, will Microsoft Office 2007 have moved on, so we can continue to play catch up with Microsoft forever and a day?
She failed to mention that the transitional model only had 84 failure messages, all of which relating to the renaming of a naming schema which was fixed in the BRM, hence why the version of Office at that time didn't support it, which I'm led to believe it now does.
PJ is a blogger. She has her own personal agenda and she approaches every story from the same point of view. It makes her human, but it also means she's not objective, and it shows when all evidence she finds is presented to fit her point of view. So, like any story on Slashdot I feel free to take her opinions with a pinch of salt.
Open source is not just two English words crammed together.
I can't help but wonder what you think it is - the term 'open source' is absolutely two English words crammed together. Unfortunately for Bruce, they already convey a meaning when you do the cramming, unlike (as someone suggested in another post) hotdogs.
It has a meaning that is widely understood and accepted in the field.
Absolutely, and everywhere I've encountered it, the meaning has been "you can view the source", no more and no less. OSI will have to work long and hard to usurp that default definition.
I think you really need to read what I'm trying to tell you.
I'm not arguing that your definition is better, or worse. I'm not question the heritage of open source or the benefits of releasing under licenses that the OSI approve. I don't know where you could have read that in any of my posts.
I am trying to say that you've defined a very complex definition for open source, whereas the phrase 'open source' conveys a much simpler set of parameters. I'm not saying either is right or wrong. I am telling you that Microsoft is conforming to one and not the other, and the one they're conforming to is the definition that I encounter most often. Nothing more, nothing less.
You've spent a lot of time evanglising about the benefits of open source as you define it when you didn't have to.
Nor does it work the way that you seem to think it does.
I suppose you think that a hot dog is a canine at a higher than normal temperature too.
I suppose you think that hot dogs have always been called hot dogs - there was no intervening period while the phrase gained acceptance, it was literally just a mental switch-flip and everyone was calling them hotdogs.
Microsoft only fails Transitional OOXML on one count, which is that one function returns the wrong type of positive result, which you can find from the blog of the guy who originally tested it:
Sure enough (again) the result is as expected: relatively few messages (84) are emitted and they are all of the same type complaining e.g. of the element:
since the allowed attribute values for val are now "true", "false", etc. this was one of the many tidying-up exercices performed at the BRM
I'm not paid to write crap like this, it's all my own work I'm afraid to say. What about your crap? Do you get paid to write that, or are you a freelance crapper like myself?
My point was that the analogy wasn't a very good one because people put wildly different expectations on software and movies, but thank you for the copious amount of insults and the assumption that I didn't know what I was talking about. Incidentally, I did enjoy your amusing lecture on how words "do not mean whatever anyone wants them to mean" before you moved on to defining various words for me. It's almost as if you were trying to say "open doesn't mean what you want it to mean, it means what I want it to mean".
What is it with people today - seems like a Slashdot competition to be World's Most Arrogant Jackass.
My point was really that "open source" already conveys something far more simple than what you want people to read into it, and it's the simple definition that Microsoft are very obviously meeting.
Even with your more complex definition for the purposes of the OSI, the MS-LPL only fails on one count of 10, which is regarding being technology-neutral. We could further argue on how important to the issue that is but I think we'd be digressing even further from what I'm trying to say.
its because a multitude of stupid morons using the internet have taken to a stupid fad named 'godwinning' and started to debase and trivialize the biggest lesson mankind ever learned ?
Comparing companies trying to make money from software licensing to them profitting from the wholesale slaughter of the Jews puts you firmly in the multitude.
By your definition, the latest feature films are "open" as well. After all, you can look at them. You can't copy them, distribute them, compile them, or anything else.
C'mon, we both know you're cleverer than this. We're talking about the definition of 'open source', not open in general and certainly not Software Freedom or copyright of any kind, which is what the article would like us to get incensed about.
I respect you and your work Bruce, but I'm going to have to disagree with you completely here - I'm not missing a damn thing, and I believe you're getting yourself lost in a moral definition of a very simple English phrase - the source is open and it therefore is 'open source'. One of the plus points of open source as I'm led to understand is that others can review the code to increase trust in that code, many eyes and all that. This is possible with the license as given and as such provides at the benefits that open code can provide. I agree that it doesn't follow the FSF-approved definitions of Free Software or "software libre" but that's not what this is about in the slightest.
That's your opinion. As far as I'm concerned, open source means exactly that - the source is open. People seem to be intent on tacking on a whole load of 'moral' obligations that someone has to follow to qualify to use 'open source', when nothing could be further from the truth.
Definitely a very liberal sprinkling of "Open Source is our phrase, you can't use it" going around the comments on this article.
As mentioned below, I wasn't commenting on the content, I was commenting on whether the 7-personality self-aggrandizing shitfest was particularly necessary in making the point.
I wasn't commenting on that, I was commenting on the 7 sockpuppet conversation that twitter decided to have with himself at the start of the comments.
I am seriously beginning to question his sanity - I mean, in the last 6 months he's accused me of sending him death threats, of working for Microsoft and of harbouring multiple Slashdot accounts, none of which are remotely true and the latter being supreme hypocrisy. He's a newspaper headline waiting to happen.
are there any morons among us, who are STILL saying that microsoft did nothing wrong in this ooxml scandal ?
Come to mention it, some actual concrete proof would be nice, but I've already found out that I'm as likely to get that as Ellen Degeneres is of settling down with a nice man. Call me a moron if you like, but I tend to like evidence that isn't circumstantial groklawed hogwash before accusing people of anything.
A lot of people on Slashdot forget how many companies rely on Microsoft's dominance of the market to make a living. Instead of thinking "Well, maybe the reason a lot of companies registered to vote is because their profit margin relies on OOXML becoming a standard", they instead jump to the most extreme conclusion they can find.
Slashdot Mirror
I really don't agree, but there you go.
Your post is just astounding, a perfect example of 'if you're not with me you're against me' posturing, backed up with a healthy amount of insults and finished off with veiled assertions that I'm paid to "redefine" terminology for Microsoft's benefit. You've failed to actually address my point, which is that "open source" as a combination of words already suggests a definition that the OSI has been and is trying to extend. When you're trying to work out who is redefining the term open source, I suggest you try looking at the group who tried to trademark it.
In the meantime, I suggest you do some research on how the English language has evolved over the last hundred years or so for an idea on why just saying "we've defined it as this" is not enough, and I can only agree with you when you say that arbitrarily redefining a term to fit what a small subsection of the population wants is idiocy. Hell, it was exactly the point I was trying to make in the first place.
I agree - competition is good for everyone.
However, there are still a lot of companies who are heavily invested in Microsoft technology to the point where it's cheaper to pay the fee and vote for OOXML than to think about retraining in other specifications.
I wish I hadn't written that line, because it did exactly what I was worried it would do - which was distract from my main point.
I understand that it fails on those guidelines, but that's all they are. They're not laws, they're not immutable, and I definitely don't have to agree with them.
No, you are wrong.
You can use it wrongly, as can MS, but pretending that you can decide, against everyone else, what a term means, is a fault that lies with you, not everyone else.
Hypocrisy, thy name is node 3. I've told you that the prevailing attitude among friends and coworkers (and we do deal with this stuff a lot in my job) is that open source means the source is available. In your own words, it is not for you to tell me I am wrong.
PJ has a history of misrepresenting various pieces of evidence, especially regarding Microsoft. For example, take PJ's take on OOXML compatibility:
"17MB (around 122,000) of invalidity messages" in the strict test; less in a "transitional" model, meaning one no one on the planet will be using, since the entire point of the BRM was to fix stuff and none of those fixes are yet incorporated into Microsoft Office 2007. And by the time they are, will Microsoft Office 2007 have moved on, so we can continue to play catch up with Microsoft forever and a day?
She failed to mention that the transitional model only had 84 failure messages, all of which relating to the renaming of a naming schema which was fixed in the BRM, hence why the version of Office at that time didn't support it, which I'm led to believe it now does.
PJ is a blogger. She has her own personal agenda and she approaches every story from the same point of view. It makes her human, but it also means she's not objective, and it shows when all evidence she finds is presented to fit her point of view. So, like any story on Slashdot I feel free to take her opinions with a pinch of salt.
Open source is not just two English words crammed together.
I can't help but wonder what you think it is - the term 'open source' is absolutely two English words crammed together. Unfortunately for Bruce, they already convey a meaning when you do the cramming, unlike (as someone suggested in another post) hotdogs.
It has a meaning that is widely understood and accepted in the field.
Absolutely, and everywhere I've encountered it, the meaning has been "you can view the source", no more and no less. OSI will have to work long and hard to usurp that default definition.
Annoying as this may be to you, you may have just convinced me to visit Maine the next time I cross the ocean...
I think you really need to read what I'm trying to tell you.
I'm not arguing that your definition is better, or worse. I'm not question the heritage of open source or the benefits of releasing under licenses that the OSI approve. I don't know where you could have read that in any of my posts.
I am trying to say that you've defined a very complex definition for open source, whereas the phrase 'open source' conveys a much simpler set of parameters. I'm not saying either is right or wrong. I am telling you that Microsoft is conforming to one and not the other, and the one they're conforming to is the definition that I encounter most often. Nothing more, nothing less.
You've spent a lot of time evanglising about the benefits of open source as you define it when you didn't have to.
Nor does it work the way that you seem to think it does.
I suppose you think that a hot dog is a canine at a higher than normal temperature too.
I suppose you think that hot dogs have always been called hot dogs - there was no intervening period while the phrase gained acceptance, it was literally just a mental switch-flip and everyone was calling them hotdogs.
Then I misunderstood your point, and I apologise.
I still disagree, as I don't believe that Microsoft can be objectively compared with the 3rd Reich, but I understand where you are coming from.
Microsoft only fails Transitional OOXML on one count, which is that one function returns the wrong type of positive result, which you can find from the blog of the guy who originally tested it:
Sure enough (again) the result is as expected: relatively few messages (84) are emitted and they are all of the same type complaining e.g. of the element:
since the allowed attribute values for val are now "true", "false", etc. this was one of the many tidying-up exercices performed at the BRM
You can find a list of other supported implementations here: ECMA 376 implementations.
I'm not paid to write crap like this, it's all my own work I'm afraid to say. What about your crap? Do you get paid to write that, or are you a freelance crapper like myself?
My point was that the analogy wasn't a very good one because people put wildly different expectations on software and movies, but thank you for the copious amount of insults and the assumption that I didn't know what I was talking about. Incidentally, I did enjoy your amusing lecture on how words "do not mean whatever anyone wants them to mean" before you moved on to defining various words for me. It's almost as if you were trying to say "open doesn't mean what you want it to mean, it means what I want it to mean".
What is it with people today - seems like a Slashdot competition to be World's Most Arrogant Jackass.
My point was really that "open source" already conveys something far more simple than what you want people to read into it, and it's the simple definition that Microsoft are very obviously meeting.
Even with your more complex definition for the purposes of the OSI, the MS-LPL only fails on one count of 10, which is regarding being technology-neutral. We could further argue on how important to the issue that is but I think we'd be digressing even further from what I'm trying to say.
its because a multitude of stupid morons using the internet have taken to a stupid fad named 'godwinning' and started to debase and trivialize the biggest lesson mankind ever learned ?
Comparing companies trying to make money from software licensing to them profitting from the wholesale slaughter of the Jews puts you firmly in the multitude.
By your definition, the latest feature films are "open" as well. After all, you can look at them. You can't copy them, distribute them, compile them, or anything else.
C'mon, we both know you're cleverer than this. We're talking about the definition of 'open source', not open in general and certainly not Software Freedom or copyright of any kind, which is what the article would like us to get incensed about.
I respect you and your work Bruce, but I'm going to have to disagree with you completely here - I'm not missing a damn thing, and I believe you're getting yourself lost in a moral definition of a very simple English phrase - the source is open and it therefore is 'open source'. One of the plus points of open source as I'm led to understand is that others can review the code to increase trust in that code, many eyes and all that. This is possible with the license as given and as such provides at the benefits that open code can provide. I agree that it doesn't follow the FSF-approved definitions of Free Software or "software libre" but that's not what this is about in the slightest.
A real open source license wouldn't do that
That's your opinion. As far as I'm concerned, open source means exactly that - the source is open. People seem to be intent on tacking on a whole load of 'moral' obligations that someone has to follow to qualify to use 'open source', when nothing could be further from the truth.
Definitely a very liberal sprinkling of "Open Source is our phrase, you can't use it" going around the comments on this article.
there were a lot of companies who depended on the nazi party to make a living
This kind of comment is why it's so hard to have a serious conversation about this with anybody on Slashdot.
No offense to GP, but I'd like to think I write more eloquently than that. Furthermore, I'm not scared of writing "fuck" on a website.
As mentioned below, I wasn't commenting on the content, I was commenting on whether the 7-personality self-aggrandizing shitfest was particularly necessary in making the point.
I wasn't commenting on that, I was commenting on the 7 sockpuppet conversation that twitter decided to have with himself at the start of the comments.
I am seriously beginning to question his sanity - I mean, in the last 6 months he's accused me of sending him death threats, of working for Microsoft and of harbouring multiple Slashdot accounts, none of which are remotely true and the latter being supreme hypocrisy. He's a newspaper headline waiting to happen.
are there any morons among us, who are STILL saying that microsoft did nothing wrong in this ooxml scandal ?
Come to mention it, some actual concrete proof would be nice, but I've already found out that I'm as likely to get that as Ellen Degeneres is of settling down with a nice man. Call me a moron if you like, but I tend to like evidence that isn't circumstantial groklawed hogwash before accusing people of anything.
A lot of people on Slashdot forget how many companies rely on Microsoft's dominance of the market to make a living. Instead of thinking "Well, maybe the reason a lot of companies registered to vote is because their profit margin relies on OOXML becoming a standard", they instead jump to the most extreme conclusion they can find.
Do better than what? It's a serious suggestion. Get some psychiatric help - you've clearly lost a screw somewhere important.
Get help.
It's not that he doesn't realise, he honestly doesn't care.
This is a guy who would try and argue physics with Stephen Hawking if he challenged his extremely narrow worldview.
Just wonder how much do we have to wait for a fart capture device
Thank you, Argentina.