Talk:Open source movement

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[edit] Originality and credit

I have doubts about the fundamental claims of this article. The sharing principle is somewhat older than open source, or even free software. For example, peer review and the sharing of knowledge has been institutionalized in science since at least the ninteenth century, and I don't think even that is the earliest example of the institutionalization of sharing as an ethic.

How, then, is the open source movement qualified to take credit for opening up of course curricula, greater distribution of findings in science, etc.? These points, at least, must be discussed. --CYD

The free software movement was important in making a political statement in intellectual property freedom. Indeed, peer review and sharing of knowledge inside the scientific community is most definitely not based on freedom in the same sense that free software is, indeed, when scientists publish papers in peer-reviewed journals, they're usually required to sign away the exclusive rights to reproduction and archiving to those journals, who consequently make large amounts of money from selling subscriptions as well as access to their archives. --Joakim Ziegler
However, scientists have no restrictions on quoting, using, and building on the results published by other scientists. That is a very similar procedure; not identical, but the medium isn't identical.
I don't doubt that open source / free software ideas have had *some* impact; some of the examples in the article offered have been pretty good. However, I've yet to see a credible and convincing study of the broader impact of the "open source movement". After all, weblogs, the USENet, and various collaborative efforts on the Internet have existed long before 1998. If they had been invented later, I suppose they would be dubbed "open source" too. At this point, this is largely speculation, at least from my POV :-) --CYD


[edit] Article inaccuracy

Hmmm... this article seems pretty inaccurate. Did BSD licenses really first start in 1998? I think not. Perhaps the coverage of the OSF open source movement should be distinct from the coverage of the generic open source movement? At the moment this, and a fair bit of the other open source coverage, reads as a description of the OSF rather than the open source movement and open source in general. Any thoughts on how to correct this so that the full history and culture of open source is included, not just the recent, though very popular, OSF version of it? --Jamesday 04:59, 11 May 2004 (UTC)

I don't see your point- the BSD claim is gone anyway; but the point of the '98 figure was that the open source movement began several many years after Stallman and the free software movement. --maru 16:12, 18 May 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Introduction

I don't get why people keep re-adding this. Furthermore, it makes even less sense to keep in something totally inaccurate just for the sake of having an intro paragraph. The "it's better to have POV/completely inaccurate information than have none at all" mantra makes no sense. There's no evidence that this movement is an "offshoot" of the free software movement, especially considering it follows a different, contradicting philosophy. This philosophy is as old as dirt, BSD was open sourced in '89, a project which was completely independent of FSF/GNU anything.

It's not just "pragmatic concerns." And the usage of the word "propaganda" to describe open source movement's literature is extremely POV. There's also this misleading statement that keeps getting cited in these articles that the movement was just suddenly founded in 1998, as if the OSI represents the whole of the movement and its start. Even The Cathedral and the Bazaar predates that, along with major open source projects (e.g. BSDs). Nathan J. Yoder 00:08, 21 October 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Is it a "movement"?

I'm skeptical that there is an open source "movement". There is a free software movement - it's a social movement to win the freedom for everyone to help themselves and each other. Open source, on the other hand, is a marketing campaign for the software. Richard Stallman often used the term "open source movement" in the past, and I always disagreed with him that such a thing existed. Now it seems that he is no longer convinced of its existence [1]. I don't see how "open source" is a Social movement. It is an initiative, but calling it that would be confusing since the Open Source Initiative name is taken. Is campaign an accurate term for what "open source" is? Gronky 15:24, 18 September 2006 (UTC)

After thinking more about this, the content of this page and the scope of this page are both contained between the articles open-source software, open source, Open Source Initiative, and free software movement - and the topic of this article doesn't exist as a topic itself. Which means this article should be merged into the mentioned 4 articles (which wouldn't be hard since it seems to only duplicate information on the mentioned 4 articles). Gronky 20:13, 12 October 2006 (UTC)
Open Source Initiative describes open source as a "marketing program". I think I agree with their description, although "marketing campaign" seems to be a more appropriate description. What do people think about renaming this article to "Open-source marketing campaign" and merging the duplicate info into "open-source software" and have this article as being just about the marketing campaign that has been running from 1998 until now? Gronky 15:30, 23 January 2007 (UTC)
After still more thought, I think the best route would be to merge this into the Open Source Initiative article. Gronky 18:37, 30 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Factual reference

Could you please provide links for those claims: "Microsoft's intense attacks on the GPL in 2001" and the "SCO lawsuit attacking the Linux kernel in 2003"? Thank you