Can you really call yourself open source if you haven’t opened the source? I don’t think so. There’s a flood of “open source” companies selling things that work on open source but which aren’t open source themselves. I think these are proprietary products, not open source. That’s been the attitude that helped me select talks for OSCON–I only want open source products talked about. My rule of thumb is that the audience should be able to download, compile, and use the software that is talked about.

[ via Is "Open Source" Now Completely Meaningless? ]

One of the most confusing things about open source is what open source means. Is it free? Does it only work with Linux? Can you change it? Does it have to be software?

It seems there are many projects which are free, and user/developer friendly, but now are not actually sharing their source. These might be the people who are causing the most confusion. When I consider whether to test or use a new piece of software, I am primarily concerned with whether or not I can download the whole code. Whether or not I would even consider digging around under the hood–not to mention, contribute to the code–doesn’t matter. I just want to know that I could tweak things, and give those tweaks to others.

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