[Balug-Talk] license count != software popularity (Re: Open Source less popular than Free Software)

[Jesse Zbikowski]

On 9/26/07, Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com> wrote:
> Quoting Chris Waters (xtifr at debian.org):
> > as evidence
> > of the popularity of the term open source, I will note that popular
> > alt-rock bank The Smashing Pumpkins recently announced their new (and
> > arguably mislabeled) "open source taping policy":

Yes, I would argue this is mis-labeled.  Folks get hip to some form of
the "Creative Commons"  idea, grab one of the terms ("open source"),
and use it where there isn't really any concept of "source".  This
might better be called "open access" or "unrestricted taping".

> _Naturally_ the term "open source" has
> various other meanings in other contexts, some of them rather old.

I think it's the other way around.  S.P. is calling their policy "open
source" in a direct nod to Linux, etc.  Yes, people do refer to an
uncompressed recording as "source" but I don't think that was their
idea.

For example, the author Thomas Friedman refers to almost any kind of
online project that's "bottom up" / "distributed" / "collaborative" as
being "open source", e.g. bloggers are "open source" journalists.  It
sounds really weird hearing him say this stuff; I think he needs a
more general term for these phenomena.

> You could also have mentioned the intelligence (spying) community's notion
> of "open source", for example.

This is an exception; as far as I know, OSINT is the only widespread
use of the phrase "open source" which predates and does not refer to
F/L/OSS.