Back to semantics and the stuggle over the O word.
I've found that one of the roots of our collective problem - is the term "Open Source". One man's Open is another man's Free and there you have it - no one definition for an entire movement.
Take Userland's Frontier system - for example. For years (after Userland gave up trying to sell Frontier as a scripting language for the Mac GUI) - Userland "gave away" Frontier - charging nothing for it. But yet, it was impossible to get respect, uptake or support from the enterprise/IT community. As much as Userland tried - by giving away source - showing compelling examples of what to do with a CMS (content management system) - and establishing new standards - no one wanted to committ to a "free" system.
So Userland decided to charge for it. Now (all of a sudden) the product could be supported, developers could rely upon it and a commercial play was founded. Needless to say the technology was the same, but the business model went from "free" to "pay for this". During this time period - Mr. Eric "Cathedral/Bazaar" Raymond comes up with this rap - and a battle immediately ensued between "I'm free, but not open" versus "We're open, free, but yet......" and so on.
Endless variants on the same thing - is a good thing, from my POV. My recent epiphanies tell me there is no ONE form of open source, as Tim O'Reilly's recent speeches have pointed out. Google, Amazon and Technorati are open, but not necessarily free. And there's plenty of other variants. So anyway here's Doc's post on the issue.....
Democratic democracy.
Dave has a problem with describing the Dean Campaign and other "open" political movements as "open source." I agree that it's confusing at best.
What we're witnessing now is what happens when you add the Net to democracy. The result, literally, is networked democracy. "Open" is a significant part of that, but it doesn't go deep enough.
We're just beginning to figure it out, too.
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