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Quoting Craig R. McClanahan ([EMAIL PROTECTED]):
> It may come as a surprise to all the youngters out there :-), but some of
> the buzzwords that we geeks have co-opted actually had a meaning BEFORE
> there was such a thing as a computer!
>
> "Proprietary" in this sense means either owned by, or available from, a
> single source. The former (ownership) is part of what the open source
> community hates about the word, but the latter (availability) is just as
> valid a concern, and it is an issue in the case at hand.
Concerns about availability may be valid, but "proprietary" is not
a word that you can use to describe that.
"Proprietary" is a legal term, and it only means "owned thing, not
in the public domain". It has that meaning whether you are talking
about software or not. People usually employ the word "proprietary"
when they are attempting to restrict access to something they created,
and they are asserting their rights of ownership in order to do it.
The word "proprietary" is only ever associated with availability in the
sense that if access is restricted, and the vendor goes out of business,
then there is nobody left to sell and maintain the software/work and you
can't get it anymore. This does NOT happen with open source projects:
ownership rights are not restricted, so anybody can step in and take
over development.
I'm objecting to the use of the word "proprietary" because (a) WebMacro
is not proprietary (I still own it in some senses, but the GPL grants
you just about every right of ownership there is), and (b) the word
has come to have nasty connotations in the software world, where
many people have been burned by proprietary software when the vendor
loses interest in it or disappears.
As for availability:
There ARE people who would jump in and take over WebMacro development
if I disappeared, just as there are with any reasonable sized
open-soruce project--other users need it to be maintained, fixed, and
improved too, and since it was free for them, they usually feel that
it's fair to share their improvements with others. This gives many
other people the security they require in order to use the software,
and they like the features that WebMacro has over JSP.
As an open-source project grows, the role of its original author
increasingly becomes an integration task--monitoring, accepting, and
merging the changes of many participating developers.
However, if you prefer JSP, or prefer that it has many implementations,
or whatever, I'm not going to argue with you. It's your right, and your
personal choice, and you don't have to defend it.
I am only objecting to the word "proprietary" being used to label
WebMacro as something it isn't.
Justin
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