[TAG] [lg-announce] Linux Gazette #140 is out!

[Rick Moen]

Hi, Howard.  Just a brief afterthought.  (Sorry to be in a hurry; I'm 
taking care of multiple things at once.)

Quoting Howard Dyckoff (howarddy3 at att.net):

> I did wonder about a few of the companies in the list, but at the
> webinars and conferences I've attended of late, there is a very
> expansive use of the term Open Source.   The discussion is usually not
> how open a company is but rather which license they are using.   And
> there certainly has been a lot of discussion about GNU vs BPL vs
> Apache, etc.  

Just to encourage you along those lines, and comment further, "how open
a _company_ is" is not at issue -- though many people (I don't mean you)
seem to get confused on this point.  When we talk about open source
licensing, we're not talking about any qualities of the companies that
use or publish that software, but rather about qualities of _software_.
This recurring digression about "What is an open source company?" is
basically nonsensical (as the phrase has no meaning), and, in some
people's hands, serves as a red herring to distract listeners away from
real issues.

> When it comes to product-oriented stories, I just summarize the press
> release and do little followup.   So, if we want to police the use of
> the term 'open source' a bit in all News Byte stories, I can try to do
> that.   

No need.  I was just a bit amazed that we'd been discussing SugarCRM, et
alii and the red flag they've raised for _months_, and yet the RH press
release's mention of a half-dozen such firms as doing "open source"
didn't make you even say to yourself, "Hmm, aren't these the exact same
firms that have been doing _fake_ open source?  Maybe I should
double-check this on TAG."  I wish it had.  That's all.

On the other hand, as I mentioned, one wouldn't normally expect Red Hat,
of all companies, to be sleazy on software licensing.