[1]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 [2] 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 [3]. 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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