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> If just anyone could label their food "organic", then what are the odds that word would ever actually mean anything? Let's recast this. How you like to pay a
by xirium 18y ago
> If just anyone could label their food "organic", then what are the odds that word would ever actually mean anything?
Let's recast this. How you like to pay a third party an ongoing annual royalty for the privilege of calling your own software open source? We're smart enough to get concensus on a definition and, if necessary, back it with case law. We don't need interest groups co-opting words from the dictionary for their own financial interest.
- dreish 18y agoGiven the profusion of licenses, that might not be far from a bad idea, though I suspect a trademark licensing fee would not find many takers unless the price were in the $0.01-1.00 per year range. I don't need the phrase anyway -- I call my work free software (which can't be trademarked), and describe it as GPL- or LGPL-licensed.
- zasz 18y agoI can tell if your software is open-source if you leave the source code on your website. I can't tell if "free-range" eggs were actually laid by hens allowed to range freely. Whether something is open-source or not is pretty obvious; whether something is organic or not is difficult to verify and not generally well-understood yet.