On May 26, 2004, at 1:06 PM, Peter Reitsma wrote:
Imho the word 'open source' is really becoming semantically overloaded. For the projects you mention lot of traditional open source characteristics that gave the positive connotation to the word do not apply.
Main characteristic of traditional open source products to me is that the product is developed and maintained by a community of developers. This results in many eyeballs, many bugfixers, lots of public discussion, bazaar vs cathedral etc. I think these things are in place for MMBase, Apache server, Linux etc and it is for this reason fair to assume this software is better, more stable robust etc because they are (traditional) open source.
Addressing products that are developed by just a few people within a organization and are made downloadable afterwards as 'open source', is not really contributing to the clearness of meaning of the word. It somehow feels to me the word is being hijacked. Couldn't we just call these things 'shareware' or something else ?
Sorry if we talk about opensource we mean we follow the attached license with
all demands on/within it. Sure you demand/want more within the context of mmbase
but that doesn't in anyway change the word and its meaning : www.opensource.org.
Notice that in kees example he doesn't even (or only) seems interested in the whole
product(s) part wants to reuse parts. If he follows the terms as found in the license that
is all it demands. Opensource makes a 'bazaar' model possible but in now way demands it.
Within the range of possible opensource licenses anyone can pick the model they like to allow/disallow
uses of the software.
I do agree that it would be nice in the future to see who is supporting a product in the future within the mmbase
context so for example while submarine is the initiator/maintainer of mmbob we also made space for you to
add supporting companies and supporting developers so you can see who is involved in the past/current/future
of a product.
It might also be a nice idea to add some meta info per applications/product on the development model the maintainer
wants to follow but this is not a demand by opensource itself.
Daniel.
