On Tue, Mar 5, 2013 at 11:34 AM, Dennis E. Hamilton <dennis.hamil...@acm.org> wrote: > It is a local style agreement of course. "Open source" almost always works >
I just did a little digging, and noticed that OSI uses various formulations of the name on their website. For proper nouns like The Open Source Initiative or the Open Source Definition, on their front page[1] they use caps[1]. On the same page, they seem to refer to the general idea of 'open source' in lowercase. > In some English language practice, hyphenation is sometimes > used when the term is placed as a single adjective, as in > "formerly open-source software." Confusion is unlikely in the > "open source" case, and the OSI makes no use of it. The OSD[2] does use the hyphenated term "open-source software" twice, although that might just be Bruce Perens' particular spelling of the term :-) The OSI FAQ[3] does use various spellings (open source, Open Source software, open source software, etc..), however it is somewhat consistent: It seems that the general idea of open source-y stuff is in lowercase, but anything classified as an "Open Source license" or even as being "Open Source" is in caps, perhaps conferring some form of acknowledgement or recognition by OSI that a particular piece of software or particular license meets the OSD's requirements. The page is not entirely self-consistent on this score, perhaps a result of multiple authors making updates over multiple years, but there does seem to be at least some thought given to capitalization. On Tue, Mar 5, 2013 at 11:58 AM, Jean Weber <jeanwe...@gmail.com> wrote: > We have a style guide (Chapter 5 of the Contributors' Guide) , and > "open source" (two words, no hyphen) is in it. (See the section titled > "Commonly used words".) Excellent. I agree with Marc Paré: Stick with what this spec says until we decide to update it. > Yes, I'm aware that the entire contributors' guide needs to be updated > and some bits of it expanded. That's next on my To Do list, after I > finish some other work. If we do take a crack at updating the Style Guide soon, it might behoove us to consider how we wish to refer to the software and to our community. Do we want to use "Open Source" or "Free Software" or "Libre Software," or perhaps some combination thereof? Cheers, --R [1] http://opensource.org/ [2] http://opensource.org/osd [3] http://opensource.org/faq -- Unsubscribe instructions: E-mail to documentation+h...@global.libreoffice.org Problems? http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: http://listarchives.libreoffice.org/global/documentation/ All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted
