Objective of IFSO Re: [Fsfe-ie] stuff from the past week [adelaney at cs.may.ie]

[David Golden]

On Sat 01 Nov 2003 17:41, Niall Douglas wrote:

> The problem is that the term, irrespective of whoever defines it,
> means what it means in English ie; any software is open source if it
> comes with source.

English isn't like French, there is no one central authority to decide what it 
means.  If the bulk of the people to whom the term has relevance use Open 
Source in the OSI sense (anecdotal: from what I have seen, they mostly do, 
even in hostile environs like ZD and MSN), that's what it means.

As I already hinted, I know from experience that at least some people in 
not-exactly-programmer circles do NOT consider all software that comes with 
source "open" source - at least the mechanical engineers I worked with fully 
grasped that just because you got the source for something didn't make it 
open.  Unlike MS and Sun,  commercial CFD/FEA code companies mostly didn't 
even try to pretend otherwise (in fact, they were more often careful to 
stress it was NOT "open" - but of course CFD and FEA codes are niche low 
volume high value instead of mass high volume low value like MS).