Lex Spoon lex@cc.gatech.edu said:
you worry that businessmen will equate "open source" and "OSI", but that hasn't even happened (yet?) among us technical people.
Hi all, I'm Mark Miller, and I run an open source project over at http://www.erights.org .
Lex, my perception is that this has indeed happened among both technical and business folks.
I would also argue that this is a good thing, but that's a separate matter. Briefly, the term "open source" is a line in the sand. If the term weren't made institutionally stable somehow, then interests on one side of the slippery slope would rapidly dilute all meaning out of it. I was at a weird closed (!?!) meeting where Bill Joy was trying to sell various leaders of the open source community on the acceptability of the ancestor of SCSL. If OSD hadn't pinned down a set of clear criteria, Bill Joy would have simply trumpeted this license as "open source" and the word would have lost all meaning. We have seen this over and over again with words that were coined to make a needed distinction, like "nanotechnology".
Note that this logic places much higher value on drawing a clear line and sticking with it than it does on getting the line right. Just like we draw a line on "adult" at 18. It's clearly arbitrary, but an arbitrary simple stable line is better than the mess that would result from trying to be more accurate. This is the thresholding of the world into categories that rules can apply to, just as an A-to-D converter thresholds the world into categories that digital logic can apply to. In both cases, the important thing is to remove ambiguity by making arbitrary choices. These choices don't remove actual ambiguity from our understanding of the world, but they enable disparate parts of a system to coordinate with each other in reacting to that world; since they can react to a shared abstraction of the world. Those who care about open-source need a shared distinction more than they need a good distinction. That said, I think the OSD has done a great job at creating a decent distinction.
In any case, I've read section 6 of SqueakL and don't understand the problem with it. I tried looking at the squeak archive, but it's no better indexed than mine ;), so I wasn't able to find an explanation of the problem. If this has already been hashed out, then please respond to me privately rather than on the list.
At 11:05 PM 4/29/2002 Monday, Cees de Groot wrote:
You seem to be thinking that "free software" as a term existed before the FSF used it, and similarly that "open source" as a term existed before (who?) coined it.
It was coined by Christine Peterson, the head of the Foresight Institute, cc'ed on this email.
[...] there are many organizations out there who would like to ride the open source wave but would also like to avoid paying their dues to the community, and when we ('we' as a bunch of guys who are clearly on the right side of things) start diluting the term ourselves, we cannot blame all sort of sleazy types to do the same.
Indeed! Further, we do their job for them.
---------------------------------------- Text by me above is hereby placed in the public domain
Cheers, --MarkM