Talk:Open source

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This page was cited by Harvard Journal of Law & Technology
News This page has been cited as a source by a media organization. See the 2006 press source article for details.

The citation is in: Chris Bell. "Back to the future: open source everything", Computerworld, 2006-02-27.


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Contents

[edit] Taking sides

"ideological and confrontational connotations of the term free software" is not NPOV, among other errors. Should be "Free Software" with the quotes. Cherlin 20:51, 21 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Open Source vs. Open Content

There is a confusion here between what open source and open content is. Open content licensing is not the same as open source licensing, otherwise there wouldn't be Open Content licensing. This distinction was blurred in this article, and I am going to fix that.

If Open Source is the same as Open Content, then why not let's whack the Open Content entry? People like Lawrence Lessig are probably wrong about using Open Content licensing, right? If a revert is done, I do hope that this comment in the talk page is addressed. --TaranRampersad 00:12, 20 November 2006 (UTC)

"Very nascent but has huge potential." under Technology section. Very opinionated. Genjix

[edit] so-so article

The opening particularly reads at present like a direct entry into a deep and abstrse argument between people who know everything about hte subject already. THis doesn't serve the purpose of an encyclopaedia.

I suggest:-

  • there is some difficulty handling Open source (extensions) vs open source software as in FLOSS, esr, Netscape, Mountain View etc. Split it. "In software, Open Source refers to..."
  • the genesis of the idea usefully goes very early in the article - in the introduction I'd say.
  • any effort to talk about the later application of the idea, back-fitting it to previous initiativs and behaviour (Potlatch etc if you like) should go way down the page, very much in "other uses of the idea; similar things and antecedent social phenomena", and if they are important they probably have their own articles.

Midgley 10:58, 12 April 2006 (UTC)

Well, maybe not as bad as that, and the OSS article does that already. THe beginning of this one needs work. Midgley 11:14, 12 April 2006 (UTC)

Comment:Article really needs to be expanded to include open source organizations, open source planning, implementation, etc. That or create a category known as "Open Source" and expound upon it from there. There are many things involved in the phrase "open source" that are not even remotely touched upon here. Given the time I may expound upon that myself. Seansquared 11:55, 20 July 2006

Comment: I think the Mandriva Linux screenshot should be removed immediately. For two reasons: (1) It creates confusion between open source and open source software and (2) a screenshot does not sufficiently explain what open source is. It should be moved to the OSS page instead.

i do beleve that the true concept now known as open source was orginally created by ben franklin... with his experiments with lightning.... and the lightning rod...

[edit] Merge 'Open implementation' to this page?

Someone slapped a mergefrom template at the top of this page with no supporting discussion. I've removed it because it detracts from the article (for the majority of visitors who just came here to read about 'Open source'). And what's more the merge could take place and the contents would be swallowed by this article without it impacting it much, so this page is the wrong place for the label. Much better is to have an ugly label at the top of the other page (Open implementation). So I've moved it there. Of course you can have it on both, but unless a merge is actaully under active discussion, I think it's a shame to leave it lingering on this more prominent article.

Anyway this is the place for discussion. So discuss! Should there be a seperate Open implementation article? Don't care much either way myself -- Nojer2 09:35, 26 July 2006 (UTC) http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Wickethewok User:Wickethewok

Ah actually there was this following comment on the other page. A vote for "don't merge". I'll move it here (since the merge 'discuss' links point to here). -- Nojer2 09:56, 26 July 2006 (UTC)
Dont merge - Open implementation is quite different from open source, not an appropriate merge imo. Wickethewok 16:00, 20 July 2006 (UTC)

OK Wickethewok dropped the merge template from the other page, so I guess that's resolved -- Nojer2 10:07, 19 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Merge 'Open source culture' to this page?

...and now there is an ugly mergefrom template for an Open source culture merge. At least there is a discussion this time. Go to Talk:Open source culture to talk about resolving this (i.e. decide if we should merge then remove the label, or not merge... and remove the label).

But my feeling is... while that discussion is in progress the label should be removed from this (more important) Open source page anyway, because it detracts. But anyway, the very ugly NPOV label is currently overshadowing it, so maybe it doesn't matter! -- Nojer2 10:07, 19 December 2006 (UTC)

WP policy is to discuss mergers on the "to" page, not the "from" page, since the Talk page of the "from" article will become almost invisible after the merge. I support the merge. Gronky 15:32, 26 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Jenny Everywhere

As far as I know, she is unique in being an open source fictional character. Should she be listed, and if so, where? 67.10.175.242 02:59, 11 August 2006 (UTC)

But she's not notable. It's nice trivia, but it's trivial :-) Gronky 15:32, 26 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Reasons for not promoting

Hi all,

I have not promoted this because I feel that the article still needs some work. Specifically:

  • The lead could better highlight that the article will focus on open source the concept/term/methodology not open source software.
  • The article needs to better explain the open source methodology preferably in a separate section (e.g. Methodology).
  • The article needs to make sure it doesn't become a list of everything open source and could use a tighter focus. For example, the open source beer discussion is probably too long.
  • The article's lists could use consistent formatting.

Cedars 09:19, 27 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] What about the Open Gaming License

There are a lot of pen and paper RPG games and additions to the games recently licensed under GPL, GFDL, CC and most commonly the Open Gaming License. Check out this website: http://www.opengamingfoundation.org

BT: You mean the article on Open gaming? // Brick Thrower 18:33, 29 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Advertising on Wikipedia

Fellow Wikipedians,

I just read the Open Source entry and was shocked to see what looked like an advertisement for Eric Raymond's book, The Cathedral and the Bazaar on the right hand side. Of course it only links to the gif image of the book cover and that book is a foundational document in the history of open source--still, it felt like a commercial. Am I being too sensitive? It just didn't feel in the tradition of wikipedia to so prominently promote an author that way. Let me know what you think. Domo2700 19:29, 8 September 2006 (UTC)

dominick

Why was Mandriva Linux being the "screenshot" for Open Source? It is not one of the most notable open source projects, and I think it includes non-OSS. Removed for now. Foolswisdom 19:08, 13 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] NPOV

There's nothing negative to say about open source? -- Mikeblas 02:52, 17 October 2006 (UTC)

No, there's just nothing that anyone's written on the wiki page. Why do you ask? DMacks 03:46, 17 October 2006 (UTC)
I'm asking because Wikipedia needs to be NPOV, and this article certainly isn't, since no critiques of open source are mentioned. I've marked the article NPOV for this reason. -- Mikeblas 14:59, 28 October 2006 (UTC)
oh let's troll open source people lol ^___^ -- and two POV does not somehow magically make NPOV, unless you're the mainstream media covering the U.S. elections. The article, as it stands, is unbiased towards either side. Go away, troll. Tag removed. --70.108.92.221 18:34, 29 October 2006 (UTC)
I've replaed the tag as the article remains POV. There's no coverage of the problems in the open source community, nor any discussion of the negatives in the practice. Your ad hominem attack doesn't convince me that the article is balanced. Here's a couple of references to help us get started: [1] [2] -- Mikeblas 22:26, 29 October 2006 (UTC)


oh cool someone reads big boy messageboards, will you use the word "strawman" please?? i find it a very hot commodity in the buzzword industry. [citation needed] Read what the guy below me is saying. --70.108.92.221 01:42, 2 November 2006 (UTC)
If know of any disadvantages or negative aspects then please add it, otherwise i think its unfair to label it as POV when there isn't much of "another" point of view.82.42.176.67 18:45, 13 November 2006 (UTC)

Lack of negativity does not make an article POV. I'm removing the NPOV tag. Please feel free to add criticisms to think article though. —Pengo talk · contribs 12:11, 1 November 2006 (UTC)

Fair enough. I've placed a "blanced" tag. What do you mean by "add criticisms to think article through"? -- Mikeblas 00:45, 11 November 2006 (UTC)
I don't see how it can be considered unbalanced. Should biographies also be required to have criticisms of the people they're about? And err.. I meant either "please feel free to add criticisms to the article though" or "please add criticisms you think should be added" or, umm.. a mix of the two. —Pengo talk · contribs 02:08, 14 November 2006 (UTC)
It can be considered unbalanced because it goes on for section after section touting the advantages of Open Source, but has only a couple sentences about critiques of open source. Yep; if a biographical article is to be balanced, I don't see why it shouldn't criticize the person (or, at least, their works). -- Mikeblas 15:57, 14 November 2006 (UTC)

Besides, the article already has criticism of open source: —Pengo talk · contribs

"Others argue that society loses through open sourced goods. Because there is a loss in monetary incentive to the creation of new goods, some argue that new products will not be created. This argument seems to apply particularly to the business model where extensive research and development is done, e.g. pharmaceuticals. However, others argue that visual art and other works of authorship should be free. These proponents of extensive open source ideals argue that there should be no monetary incentive for artists."

I added the NPOV tag back again. Clearly, since there is this much discussion, the article does not meet WP:NPOV guidelines. (See WP:NPOV_dispute for what qualifies: "Note, however, that there is a strong inductive argument that, if a page is in an NPOV dispute, it very probably is not neutral.") There is a pejorative tone taken vis a vis free software, and in fact the whole controversy of the free vs. open source software movements is only touched on. In addition, there's nothing of all the studies Microsoft has conducted, whether or not those studies themselves be neutral. Finally, there is no argument about the legal minefield that is open source licensing and the restrictions it has; take a look at debian-legal if you want examples. I'm not trolling, I write open source software myself, but I agree with the other posters. --Chris Pickett 03:02, 5 December 2006 (UTC)

how far are we on the issue? IMHO this is an important article, and I would love to see the NPOV/balance tag removed. What exectly are the points that need to be adressed before this would become NPOV again? We should be able to find out what needs work, and consequently edit it so that it is acceptable to all. To start out with, where are those Microsoft papers? i'll have a looksee if I can fit them in myself. Martijn Hoekstra 01:21, 28 December 2006 (UTC)

First, it would be absurd to require a criticism of everything, including biographies. But when there are criticisms that are held by an appreciable contingent (and don't ask me to define what is "appreciable" or "significant" or whatever other term you think applies), then that criticism should be included. Here, I can think of two criticisms or concerns that are pretty widely held. 1) The concern that some "Open Source" could include some code that violates a patent and 2) that the term "open source" software is a misnomer, and should not be confused with "free software" (which in turn should not be confused with "for free" software), as per Richard Stallman's argument here [3]. Josh.anders 00:36, 9 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Open source began in the 1950s

The development of early operating systems and utilites was from code freely shared between vendors and their customers. Note the IBM 701 user group, SHARE. That beginning, and why it went away, should be included in this article. 69.106.232.37 16:20, 19 October 2006 (UTC)

The article does have a passage, with the silly title 'Innovation communities', which starts off with saying that some of the principles go back to the 19th century. I'm sure the practices with respect to IBM software in the mid 20th century might belong in there, as an illustration. Note that this article is about 'Open Source', the term apparently invented by the OSI in 1998, so unless the term 'Open Source' was being bandied about before then, then your example should really only be an example of one of the historical precursors to the Open Source movement. --Aim Here 02:50, 31 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] RE: Open source began in the 1950's

I agree that this article misses the point of a process that has been going on for a very long time. The direct ancestors of GNU certainly started with things like the BSD release from Berkeley. All DARPA and government funded projects required that non-classified software be freely available to the public. All that was required was the cost of the tape for duplication.

The Ingres project at Berkeley was funded by the Census Department to process the 1970 census data. Mike Stonebraker brought in the first Unix system outside of Bell Labs into Berkeley and made copies of Ingres available to anyone, but sent them primarily to other universities. Unix then became the primary operating system at Berkeley and releases were sent out under the same rules, which ultimately became the BSD distribution and included that original Ingres system. Bill Joy was the person primarily responsible for assembling this release. Once the internet really started going beyond uucp and dial-up connections, distributions became completely electronic and totally free.

Linux, GNU and the whole open source movement owe far more to these early steps toward free and open software distribution than what is described here. Even the BSD licensing concepts were influential in the development of open source licenses.

--Johnnewton 09:38, 19 January 2007 (UTC)

GNU owes Unix nothing. Unix had quite good designed interfaces so it was convenient to start GNU by replacing bit for bit of Unix. The software before GNU was partly free software but it was not published under a free software license. Also it could not have been open source, because this term didn't exist then. Copyleft was invented by Richard Stallman. The GNU General Public License is not an open source license. It belongs to the GNU Project which belongs to the free software movement. -- mms 12:00, 19 January 2007 (UTC)
Maybe I just don't know all the facts, but I regard free software not as the exception of "regular" software which emerged from time to time in different flavors but as the usual way to deal with software. The proprietary software is the exception. Ever since software was free. At least if a nice person asked you for it or offered some money, you gave the software – which means the source – and the rights to do what the fuck you want to with it (for the modern copyright there is a correspondent license: WTFPL). -- mms 12:00, 19 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Suggestion

It should somehow be possible to organize an open source translation project – i.e. "Open Translation" for poems, songs etc.
When reading poetical translations made mainly by more or less know poets, I think one often has better ideas for certain verses or images that the poet tried to recreate in the target language – whereas for some verses he may have found English verses that are hard to improve.
Thus if many people work on trying to provide "the perfect" translation of say Der Erlkönig by not removing other ideas/text but just adding their own it should be much more likely to exhaust what the language has to offer.
I think it’s not easy to find a good organizational pattern for such a project but that's not different with Open music.
Sincerely, Christian Storm 14:05, 16 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Bad Title?

The link to "Open Source Learning Project" (under Society and Culture - Education) does not work. It links to a WikiBooks page, which says "the requested page title was invalid, empty, or incorrectly linked."

[edit] Wikipedia open source

Isn't Wikipedia the most splendid example of aplying the open source concept. How can we even think of claiming that an article about open source is even a decent article, much less a high quality article when we don't even mention this. Can I even believe that somebody who writes an article on Wikipedia about open source knows what he is talking about when he-she is not aware that every chararcter written is an open source action.

This is not the Encyclopedia Britannica, this is Wikipedia. And this is open source and we should let everybody be aware that we know what we are doing.

Afil 16:04, 26 December 2006 (UTC)

Wikipeida has more than enough self-congratulation as it is. We as editors do not need to tout how great wikipedia is in every article where we can squeeze in a line to that effect. 155.42.99.213 16:24, 4 April 2007 (UTC)
Also per Wikipedia:Avoid self-references Martijn Hoekstra 18:41, 4 April 2007 (UTC)

[edit] "fixations"?

I'm new here -- be nice!

Ironically, I came to this page to learn more about open source. Learn by doing, I guess. Somebody help me out with this quote from the page:


'"Open source" as applied to culture defines a culture in which fixations are made generally available. Participants in such a culture are able to modify those products and redistribute them back into the community.'


"fixations"??? I don't get it. The link doesn't clarify things either. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Junglebike (talk • contribs) 23:21, 30 January 2007 (UTC).

[edit] Too many useless external links

The title says what i wanted to say ;)

eg: 50 Open Source success stories in Business, Education, and Government Comedies of Fair U$e blog Microsoft Open Specification Promise

[edit] Cleanup

Currently looks like it was a bunch of articles merged together (I don't know if it was but it looks like it), has poor flow and structure. Horrible lists, generally poorly cited, overcomplex language, some bits that read like OR. Badly needs cleanup. NicM 19:55, 3 April 2007 (UTC).

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