No halo over open source
Has open source lost its halo, as Eric Lai's Computerworld article suggests? Is open-source still a grassroots social movement made up of idealistic underdogs trying to revolutionize an amoral industry?
Or is that a straw-man argument cooked up for a slow news day?
Maybe Eric Lai just has a vocabulary problem.
After all, "open source" is a term that was coined nine years ago specifically as an alternative to "free software," which is what Richard Stallman has called his software-capitalism-is-bad philosophy since 1985.
The soon-to-be-called-open-source crowd was looking for a name to describe something like Mozilla. In early 1998, Netscape had just announced it was releasing its browser source code. Nobody had any illusions that this was pure generosity on Netscape's part. Netscape Navigator had been flattened by the Microsoft's bundled-with-Windows Internet Explorer, and launching the Mozilla Project was a crass commercial attempt to use a free-software model to somehow support Netscape's proprietary Web-server software business.
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