Re: Debian mention in article on StarOffice
On Sep 07, Joseph Carter wrote:
> Read slashdot comments that happened when this article hit. The majority
> of them seem to all say that Sun's deception is pretty convincing--or if
> it isn't, they don't really much care. It's somewhat disheartening to see
> what the likes of Eric Raymond have done.
>
> The text of the OSD is pretty clear as to what most of us will accept as
> free software. If OSI had lived up to the OSD in the first place, perhaps
> many of the slashdot readers would still not get it, but I'd like to think
> that at least a few more of them would.
If I recall correctly, OSI did live up to the OSD; the problem was
that vendors (Apple, IBM, Digital Creations, Netscape) mistook the
fact they were in negotiation with OSI to produce an open-source
license for some sort of "endorsement" (i.e. the right to call
whatever they were using "open source"). Eric may have been a bit too
enthusiastic in endorsing these works-in-progress (in the Apple case),
but I don't think he deserves primary fault. After all, Apple and
everyone else did eventually get their shit together.
In retrospect, the word "Open" has been so bastardized by the industry
("The Open Software Foundation", anyone? It long predated OSI...)
that it was a mistake to use the term. If the word "liberal" hadn't
been similarly bastardized in the U.S. political scene (i.e. we could
use it in the sense of "classical liberalism"), we could all talk
about Liberal Software and everyone would be happy. Blame Bruce and
Eric together for that, if you want.
Chris
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