Website look

Göran Hultgren goran.hultgren at bluefish.se
Mon Apr 29 19:40:45 UTC 2002


Hi Lex and all!

Quoting Lex Spoon <lex at cc.gatech.edu>:
[SNIP]
> OSI is being too strict in rejecting Squeak License.  Worse, they are
> doing it in a dirty way.  When Debian describes software licenses, it
> is
> very careful to distinguish general terms like "open" from specific
> terms like "compliant with Debian's Guidelines".  OSI, on the other
> hand, seems to be playing a political word game, much like FSF with
> "free": they take a term and change it's meaning to something different
> than what people expect.  Squeak and its website is just one case in
> point of this -- you worry that businessmen will equate "open source"
> and "OSI", but that hasn't even happened (yet?) among us technical
> people.

Personally I don't worry about businessmen. Businessmen would probably like the
current wording without wondering much more. I care about developers.

> More generally, isn't it wrong to tie the open source movement into an
> institution?  An institution that several members of the community
> think
> is making bad moves?  Why do we put up with this, guys?  It's already

Yes, that might be wrong. But it's not really up to us to change it.

> widely accepted that you can be doing the free/open software kind of
> thing without buying into FSF.  Are we now going to repeat the same
> saga
> with OSI?

Hehe, I don't know. Really, I like a lot of your points.

But I still think it (the phrase on Squeak.org) should either be written
differently - or, if people really insist on keeping the current phrase "Squeak
is open source." then IMHO it should be accompanied with an explanation of FACTS.

I just don't want people to be confused or draw incorrect conclusions or in some
way get the impression that we are trying to push Squeak as something it is not.

All this may sound silly to a lot of you but there are lots of developers with
strong opinions on these things.

In short: I just want to minimize any misconceptions. Currently people could
mistakenly get the impression that Squeak is OSI OpenSource. Why don't we just
fix that in what ever way, I don't care.

I again ask - why should we NOT clarify this?

regards, Göran

PS. I am dropping this thread unless that upsets anyone, I never thought there
would be such a discussion over clarifying simple plain facts. DS

Göran Hultgren, goran.hultgren at bluefish.se
GSM: +46 70 3933950, http://www.bluefish.se
\"Department of Redundancy department.\" -- ThinkGeek



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