Fake award to "the collaborative software community"
A recent publicity stunt by Infoworld and O'Reilly and Associates was
an award to "The Collaborative Software Community" for such achievements
as Linux and Apache. The award was accepted by Tim O'Reilly. Details are
at http://www.infoworld.com/ . What's wrong with this picture?
Why is it being called "collaborative software" rather than "free
software" or "Open Source"? The reason is simple. "collaborative software"
is free software without the messy community ethics of the people who
actually wrote the software. To symbolize this, the award is accepted
by Tim O'Reilly, who has never written a line of that software, but he
sure made a whole lot of money out of it! If the award were sincere,
it would have gone to someone like Linus Torvalds or Richard Stallman,
who have actually made a contribution to the community. What Tim O'Reilly
_did_ do was hold a "summit" for free software, at which he locked out
Richard Stallman. This is hardly a good reason for an award. His second
summit isn't shaping up to be any better than the first one.
Bruce Perens
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