Interesting article in the NY Times about the Neuros open approach to product development [1] It's pretty interesting to see how a mainstream reporter views open source. After years of pitching the benefits to a mainstream audience, I've come to use the term "openness" to try to describe the phenomenon generally: inviting community cooperation and feedback, releasing documentation, using open source software, using open standards, etc. It's really splitting hairs to a mainstream audience to get them to understand the distinctions that are so clear to the folks here. In many ways, I've come to embrace this broader definition because to a large extent it gets more to the point of freedom of communication anyway.
For years, we'd try to explain open source in more precise terms, only to get reactions like "so that means its recordings will play on my iPod?" so we ultimately came to focus more on "openess" as an umbrella term to describe all the related aspects. It's certainly more ambiguous, but look at the article and you'll understand what I'm talking about. That was not a casually written piece, she interviewed not only Neuros employees, but community members as well as references from the EFF and Cory Doctorow, etc. Slashdot discussion too [2] [1]http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/06/business/06novel.html [2]http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/01/06/084242 Joe Born Neuros Technology
_______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://freeculture.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss
