“Based on Open Source Technology” is used by more than one proprietary software company as a marketing boast. Even Microsoft, everybody’s favorite symbol of software proprietarism, now boasts about releasing software under an open source license. Obviously, the phrase “Open Source” is now considered a plus when trying to sell software. Will this lead to more open source contributions by companies trying to associate themselves with this “movement” or will it lead to the death of open source as we know it?
Paying lip service to open source
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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Wow, that was 30 seconds of my life I will never get back.
This was way too “OSS-is-the-holy-grail”-ish for me.
Is sometimes all that’s required – the original BSD license. The new license doesn’t even require that… use the source in your own product and claim it all as your own.<P>
Eugenia complained that Sun’s JDS (just like every Linux distro I know of) doesn’t announce during the install process that a lot of it is GPL software.<P>
Seems corporations can’t win – advertise the fact, and you’re jumping on a bandwagon; fail to mention it at every opportunity and you’re taking without credit.
“Wow, that was 30 seconds of my life I will never get back.”
You’re a very fast reader.
I think it is making a fad of it and it will either change the software world (not likely) or it will fade back into it’s state as of 1990.
I think companies are also realizing they can cut some costs by using open software. And who knows, maybe it will increase competition if they start to have more similar bases and end up often sharing less than recent breakthroughs (let’s face it, nobody opens up their new breakthroughs, they open last years).
“Eugenia complained that Sun’s JDS (just like every Linux distro I know of) doesn’t announce during the install process that a lot of it is GPL software.<P>”
sun jds did it an extreme manner and the license agreement and stuff is said to be corrected in the next release
Seems corporations can’t win – advertise the fact, and you’re jumping on a bandwagon; fail to mention it at every opportunity and you’re taking without credit.
Too true.
I would tell it with uppercaps :
I would really think it’d be funny if MS started embracing open source more as that would really make people upset. The Open Source model is more about being against MS than being a viable way of development. Everyone knows that, few mention it. It’ll be exciting to see what MS does next…
TRUE … SO TRUE ….. SO INCREDIBLE TRUE
I mean, why do *you* write Open Source software? I write it, or I contribute to it, because *I* have an itch and I want to share the results of my work with others. This is how a lot of OS-projects used to start.
So for a part, OSS will never die as long as programmers have ideas and are willing to share their source with others, and for a part OSS as we know it is already dead, because all those company sponsored Open Source projects have nothing to do with programmer’s itches and is another form of Open Source.
Funny to read that.
would really think it’d be funny if MS started embracing open source more as that would really make people upset
Maybe some people would be upset. But if you ever heard “leaders” of the free software movement speak about that possibility, you would actually know that they would be grateful when that happened.
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The Open Source model is more about being against MS than being a viable way of development
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Pretty hard to believe, because “Open Source” has been longer around than Microsoft itself.
I like the RH model. I like the fact that almost all of their products have open source code but RH also shows why paying for it is better. Yet for a small guy like me can still get White box linux or something else and get RH’s most exspensive products for next to nothing.