GLOSS

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Generally Loquacious Overly Simplistic marketing Speak, is a term used often in conjunction with COTS, commercial-off-the-shelf software. Loquacious is defined by dictionary.com as "adj: full of trivial conversation". It usually refers to extravagant claims found on vendors' web sites that promise their software will be capable of supporting many features and standards that other commercial packages do not. The reason for this is that large vendors compete against each other for very large contracts with which to fund their continued production of GLOSS.

Observers note that the amount of GLOSS featured on a vendor web site often has a direct inverse relationship to the amount of useful and freely available API documentation or end-user documentation. This is often done to make the vendor site appeal to non-technical people who would not necessarily know what to look for when it comes to technical documentation.

One problem often found in many packages touting much GLOSS is that they don't feature the basic information system design principle of "loose coupling". This is a fancy word that boils down to the ability for a given system to exchange data with another system without having to know very much about the internal details of that other system. For example, a properly-design, loosely-coupled system would be able to easily export its data, possibly as XML, so that another system would be able to use that information without having to care what programming language or database design that other system has on the inside.

The reason that many packages featuring GLOSS do not feature loose coupling is that they often are produced by large organizations to serve large in-house enterprise needs. Unfortunately, this approach does not often take into consideration existing or emerging information exchange standards, and leads to a product that may suit the needs of the original organization very well, but since it is not well-factored, it does not scale well when implanted into other organizations without requiring extensive modifications to existing business processes and operations models.

By comparison, GLOSS is not found quite as often on web sites that feature free software programs. Instead such sites often feature much documentation, both technical and often end-user directed. Such sites tend to focus on what the software package actually can do, but do not claim that it can do more than it is designed to do. To be fair, these sites may not always have as much coordinated end-user documentation as would be necessary to successfully use the software. In addition, it does take a degree of technical-savvy and experience to properly evaluate the applicability of any given software package by considering all of its facets, especially regarding extensibility and usability.

[edit] Related terms

GLOSS is not quite the same as Vaporware, in that GLOSS may describe software that actually does exist, but does not live up to the claims of the marketing.