Thursday, June 21, 2007

Still not a zealot...

But about half of Slashdot Is Not Getting It At An Olympic Level.

In summary,

Some guy:
open source = you can see the source

Bruce Perens:
Sigh. I imagine you use some of this Open Source software sometimes. Please try to get your head around the fact that it would not be possible for such software to exist and for folks like you to benefit from it, unless it was developed. And it would not be developed without a developer community, and that community would not be able to do their work unless they had the right to modify and redistribute the software. Thus, Open Source must be more than just visible source code - it has to include the right to distribute and modify, and it also needs the right for you to use it. So, that's 4 things - source, use privilege, distribution privilege, modification privilege and there's a bit more. Years ago, I wrote down what was necessary for software to be Open Source, and OSI uses that Open Source Definition to classify licenses. It is not an arbitrary thing.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/07/15/133237