[OT] What is "open"? [was: Re: [plug] [link] Open Source win in Mass. US]

[James Devenish]

In message <3F94A5EA.3000504 at postnewspapers.com.au>
on Tue, Oct 21, 2003 at 11:20:10AM +0800, Craig Ringer wrote:
> I should have said "using the term open source as is defined by
> http://opensource.org/

Okay, fair enough, if that's what you mean, then. But it seems to be to
be an unfortunate direction for the language to take (because it binds
the meaning of the phrase to an awkwardly narrow definition). As you
say, it ties "open" with "free". Commercial vendors have "opened" up
their source in the past, but that didn't make it "free". Past versions
of Apple's source licence were not OSI approved and, I thought, did not
conform to the definition that you have cited. Yet, arbitrary Internet
users could view the code (though probably not distribute it -- I can't
remember).

I would have called that "open", because that it is covered by
conventional non-software uses of the word "open". For example: AFAIK
Sun published interface information for its UltraSparc II processors but
not its UltraSparc III processors. Therefore, USII is an "open"
architecture whilst USIII is not. (In analogy to software, they provide
the "header files only" for USII and "nothing" for USIII.) Despite being
"open", that technology is probably covered by a license that Sun has
from SPARC International. So the architecture is hardly "free" despite
being "open". It seems that if we ignore "open source", the remaining
meanings of "open" are along the lines of "viewable", "exposed",
"obtainable", "readily interfaced", "standardised", etc.


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