On Monday 27 September 2010 16.58:50 Bernhard Reiter wrote: > Yes, some people seems to call stuff "open core". I also do not have a > good explanation for that term at hand. Just two observations: the "neo" > in "neo-proprietary" does not seem to fit perfectly, this proprietary > business modell seems to be quite old.
Indeed. In the 80s we called it "crippleware." Unfortunately it would more aptly be called "abuseware" today because many of them claim towards their customers that they are "Open Source" - with all the implications this brings - which is a case of false advertising that abuses the Free Software brand. So I'd say that http://blogs.fsfe.org/greve/?p=347 is as topical as it was 15 months ago. Heck. meanwhile even Gartner caught on to this: http://blogs.gartner.com/brian_prentice/2010/03/31/open-core-the-emperors-new- clothes/ Unfortunately too many in our community don't seem to care about customers being misled. In one case I've even seen an "Open Source Award" going to such a product and company, actively encouraging the cannibalization of Free Software this represents. And customer protection has not yet caught on. So there is a vacuum of enforcement around these terms, it seems, rendering them increasingly useless, which is bad for all of us, as we lose a means of transporting what differentiates us from proprietary software. Best regards, Georg -- Georg C. F. Greve <[email protected]> Member of the General Assembly http://fsfe.org/about/greve/ http://blogs.fsfe.org/greve/ http://identi.ca/greve
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