[LUAU] the term "open source" is dead, says Eben Moglen

[Julian Yap]

On Tue, 2006-11-21 at 18:16 -1000, Hawaii Linux Institute wrote:
> Jim Thompson wrote:
> > The "term" Open Source was a marketing campaign, promulgated by Eric
> > Raymond,
> What's wrong with a marketing campaign?  The more the merrier.
> 
> If I can live comfortably on donations, I wouldn't mind insisting that
> every piece of software to "free", whatever that means.  Wayne

The problem is that "Open Source" is a muddied definition.  All it
really focuses on is the development model and hence access to the
source code.

The term "free" too is a muddied term in the English language as many
hear and think free as in $0.

The Free Software (http://www.gnu.org/) movement however stands for
freedom in terms of liberty, not price.

As a result, an "Open Source" person can look at things without
considering freedom.  

Proprietary software companies build of the term "Open Source" and
tackle the issue in terms of convenience or cost.

For example, Xen virtualization comes along as Free Software.  VMWare
then responds by putting out a version of their product, VMware Server,
as $0.  Microsoft does the same and releases Microsoft Virtual PC 2004
as $0.  Are you then inclined to use either VMWare or Virtual PC?

A Free Software person considers freedoms of the user and therefore
opposes DRM.  "Open Source" only cares if the program used to propagate
DRM is "Open Sourced".

~ Julian