How Open Source (Ideas) Can Win the War and Save the Auto Industry
I am often dismayed by the misappropriation of the term open source. Companies apply the term to products that are free though not open source. It’s a classic marketing maneuver to leverage a brand that already has broad recognition.
A clothing company sent me a release not too many months ago about their new open source clothing line. After close inspection they meant design your own outfit from their catalog of designs that they owned. It wasn’t open source but I recall a number of open source trade publications picking up the story. Good marketing stunt but not accurate.
Free isn’t open source but they effectively seized some brand equity and got their story out. Actually the term open source implies that the product has an underlying source code. It’s a software term. It has a definition. It’s about allowing someone or anyone to take a piece of work and repackage, improve, and redistribute it under the same terms that they received it.
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1 Post, 4 places
How many blogs do his writings end up in? I read his blog, but the same material ends up in TuxMachines, con-sys and his LinuxToday blog. Why not post once in 1 place?
Syndication
Roy,
A lot of sites like Linuxworld, Linux Today, Enterprise Open Source, and Planet MySQL all syndicate my blog from my RSS feed. Other times they get aggregated in news sites like Linux.com newsvac. I do read TuxMachines pretty actively so I have posted some of my larger pieces here based on the relevance of the content.
re: 1 Post, 4 places
It's not uncommon for folks to use their blog here to link to their original work on their own site. It's not discouraged - after all, tuxmachines has morphed into a news link site. If it's relevant, it's welcome.
Oh, Sorry :-(
Thanks. I didn't mean to upset Mark or yourself. I just pointed this out because I think it might be worth citing the original. To me, personally, it reduces confusion/clutter.
No Worries
No worries Roy. Just wanted to clarify. You make a good point, so many RSS to sort through I should make it easy to establish what's been published elsewhere.