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Growl fork maintainer banned from Growl mailinglist after fixing bugs

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Re: Growl fork maintainer banned from Growl mailinglist after fixing bugs

#41

Post by jbellis »

eis wrote: post #30
waitwhat wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Open Source" [...] just means you can view the source. No. See, for example, the Open Source Definition [1] by the Open Source Initiative [2] which opens with the statement "Open source doesn't just mean access to the source code." Wikipedia states that their "definition is widely recognized as the standard or de facto definition." [3] You can publish your code open source, charge for it and still forbid people to s…

You are right, very good points. So maybe I was wrong but I dealt with open source earlier than the OSI came up with the definition. What they call "Open Source" is more "Free (as in freedom, libre) Software" to me. I guess my definition is outdated but I still feel "Open Source" should just mean, well... open source :) What's the difference between "Free Software" and "Open Source" as coined by OSI?

Microsoft came up with the term "shared source" to describe "you can look at the source but you have no rights to modify or redistribute it."

Re: Growl fork maintainer banned from Growl mailinglist after fixing bugs

#42

Post by [deleted] »

mapleoin wrote: post #35
eis wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are right, very good points. So maybe I was wrong but I dealt with open source earlier than the OSI came up with the definition. What they call "Open Source" is more "Free (as in freedom, libre) Software" to me. I guess my definition is outdated but I still feel "Open Source" should just mean, well... open source :) What's the difference between "Free Software" and "Open Source" as coined by OSI?

APL/MIT/BSD/GPL are open source. GPL is the only free software though.

[deleted]

Re: Growl fork maintainer banned from Growl mailinglist after fixing bugs

#43

Post by castewart »

mansoor-s wrote: post #11
stephenr wrote: post #4

From the article: "One of the biggest problems with this approach, other than the fact they just pissed off a lot of people who beleive strongly in OSS, is that Growl is still broken. So you pay your $1.99 and it no workie. TESTING MOTHER FUCKERS, DO YOU DO IT? " I happily paid for Growl from the App store, and sure enough it works fine on both my Lion Macs. http://growl.info/documentation/developer/growl-source-inst…

"other than the fact they just pissed off a lot of people who beleive strongly in OSS" If they believe so strongly in OSS, they wouldn't use macintosh would they? Nope they don't want to pony up and take out their wallets.

If you want to develop for iOS you have to use a Mac.

Re: Growl fork maintainer banned from Growl mailinglist after fixing bugs

#44

Post by jbellis »

cousin_it wrote: post #33
patio11 wrote: post #21

The OSS community has always had an uneasy tension between a) for-profit enterprise which provides most of the man-power and b) anti-commercial poor adolescents of all ages who simultaneously think that contributing to OSS is a moral obligation and that the license and copyright assignment they fetishize includes a "All contributors will be made happy despite their total lack of business sense" clause, somewhere.

That sounds uncharitable and is that really true? Linux, Mozilla or Python don't seem to mostly rely on manpower provided by for-profit companies...

Linux is written almost entirely by employees of for-profit companies: http://lwn.net/Articles/451243/

Many core Python contributors including Guido are employed by companies like Google to work on it.

Mozilla is, technically, an exception: almost everyone is employed by the Mozilla corporation, a non-profit by virtue of its lucrative search deal with Google. Few projects have that luxury.

Re: Growl fork maintainer banned from Growl mailinglist after fixing bugs

#45

Post by irrumator »

cousin_it wrote: post #33
patio11 wrote: post #21

The OSS community has always had an uneasy tension between a) for-profit enterprise which provides most of the man-power and b) anti-commercial poor adolescents of all ages who simultaneously think that contributing to OSS is a moral obligation and that the license and copyright assignment they fetishize includes a "All contributors will be made happy despite their total lack of business sense" clause, somewhere.

That sounds uncharitable and is that really true? Linux, Mozilla or Python don't seem to mostly rely on manpower provided by for-profit companies...

Yes, they do. Who do you think contributes to the Linux kernel everyday, only individual hackers all over the world pushing FL/OSS ? The vast majority of the contributors are big-tech-co affiliated who come from places like Red Hat, Intel, IBM, Novell, Oracle, AMD, Google, and more. Individuals and those not wishing to state their affiliation/place-of-work are only about 18% of the contributors to Linux.

Btw, this is part of the issue some people have with Ubuntu, in that it makes no contributions upstream to the kernel like Red Hat, Novell and others do. A Red Hat Greg DeKoenigsberg even said on OSNews once that "Canonical is a marketing organization masquerading as an engineering organization."[1]

Python's father Guido van Rossum and other core contributor are employed by Google and other big tech companies to work on Python.

Mozilla is mostly by Mozilla people, however it's basically alive because of the funding and ad deals it has with Google. Without that, it couldn't continue.

[1] http://www.osnews.com/story/23636/Who_Really_Contributes_the...

Re: Growl fork maintainer banned from Growl mailinglist after fixing bugs

#46

Post by cousin_it »

jbellis wrote: post #44
cousin_it wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sounds uncharitable and is that really true? Linux, Mozilla or Python don't seem to mostly rely on manpower provided by for-profit companies...

Linux is written almost entirely by employees of for-profit companies: http://lwn.net/Articles/451243/ Many core Python contributors including Guido are employed by companies like Google to work on it. Mozilla is, technically, an exception: almost everyone is employed by the Mozilla corporation, a non-profit by virtue of its lucrative search deal with Google. Few projects have that luxury.

Thanks! I stand corrected.

Re: Growl fork maintainer banned from Growl mailinglist after fixing bugs

#47

Post by slowpoke »

cromulent wrote: post #34
waitwhat wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Languages evolve, and words change their meaning over time.

Sure, but they also have different meanings in different contexts, and you need to be aware of them. I can still hold a tea party for my young daughter, right? Or has that phrase been taken for ever?

There's a difference between a word gaining a second meaning, and one meaning effectively replacing the other completely.

icebraining mentioned "gay". Today, who in their right mind would call a joyful person gay? That's what the term originally meant, but has since has been completely replaced with meaning "homosexual".

The term "Open Source" is the same. It may have meant something different some one and a half decades back. That meaning, however, has completely fallen out of use. Just as "gay" meaning "joyful" has. It's deceptive to use it that way.

Re: Growl fork maintainer banned from Growl mailinglist after fixing bugs

#48

Post by sunnydaynow »

icebraining wrote: post #29
cromulent wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The OSI was founded in 1998, but companies such as SAP provided their ERP systems with full readable source code much earlier than that, and it was called "open source" (as opposed to "closed source" which was more common with COTS). However, it is explicitly forbidden in the licence to re-sell it or re-distribute it. The term pre-dates the organisation's re-definition of it for their own purposes.

Yes, and "gay" used to mean a different thing. Nowadays the only widespread definition of Open Source is the one defined by the OSI. Using it to mean something else is deceptive.

I disagree. Is SAP deceptive just because one popular organization prefers another definition of open source? The OSI did not invent the term "open source". The term "open source" itself should not imply a specific license.

Re: Growl fork maintainer banned from Growl mailinglist after fixing bugs

#49

Post by chalst »

eis wrote: post #22
rmc wrote: post #7

decided they should be paid for their work. There is one slight problem however. Growl is Open Source Software. So? You can sell open source software. Just because software is GPL/BSD licenced doesn't mean you can't sell it. Open Source ≠ Non-commerical. Closed Source ≠ Commmerical. You can change for open source software. If something is open source you can't complain if someone sells it. Obviously if the software i…

If something is open source you can't complain if someone sells it. Obviously if the software is open source, everyone who buys a copy is allowed to sell the software themselves and they don't have to give the original author any money. They also cannot stop someone taking an older version of the code and distributing it. What? I really don't get why so many people don't understand that "Open Source" does not mean yo…

"You can publish your code open source, charge for it and still forbid people to sell it or even redistribute the source." - Microsoft tried to call such a strategy open source; this was widely rejected and the approach was called "source under glass".

Re: Growl fork maintainer banned from Growl mailinglist after fixing bugs

#50

Post by cromulent »

slowpoke wrote: post #47
cromulent wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but they also have different meanings in different contexts, and you need to be aware of them. I can still hold a tea party for my young daughter, right? Or has that phrase been taken for ever?

There's a difference between a word gaining a second meaning, and one meaning effectively replacing the other completely. icebraining mentioned "gay". Today, who in their right mind would call a joyful person gay ? That's what the term originally meant, but has since has been completely replaced with meaning "homosexual". The term "Open Source" is the same. It may have meant something different some one and a half de…

"That meaning, however, has completely fallen out of use."

I'm not convinced of that - in fact, I think that is a little naive.

I don't believe that the OSI definition is completely accepted by the uneducated population at large, and don't believe that the term "open source" is not used by various software companies in ways that mislead and obfuscate the OSI meaning.

I'll quote Mr Stallman:

"However, the obvious meaning for the expression “open source software”—and the one most people seem to think it means—is “You can look at the source code.” That criterion is much weaker than the free software definition, much weaker also than the official definition of open source. It includes many programs that are neither free nor open source."

"The term “open source” has been further stretched by its application to other activities, such as government, education, and science, where there is no such thing as source code, and where criteria for software licensing are simply not pertinent. The only thing these activities have in common is that they somehow invite people to participate. They stretch the term so far that it only means “participatory”."

I don't accept that the other meanings have completely fallen out of use.

Edit: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.h...

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