Welcome to 1998

Carl Grant writes [1]:

"For OSS to go beyond being an academic practice; beyond being an activity practiced in basements in people’s spare time; and finally beyond being just the sexy word that it is at the moment, then it’s really important that we work out ways to make OSS (and for that matter, open standards, which is really a variation on the theme) coexist with, and indeed support commercial activities. Ultimately that is how things will get done and how usable products will result."

I don't know a thing about running for-profit businesses, which is why I don't do it. But if I were to start a new company with the aim of commercializing FLOSS toolkits -- nothing wrong with that, if you're an honest broker and give back in proportion to what you take in, especially in a small community like ours -- I wouldn't want to start off new my big product offerings by offending the FLOSS developers whose awesome toolkits I'm commercializing.

If he really thinks that OSS is some sort of "sexy word at the moment" or solely an academic or basement practice, he's delusional. (Contrasting that with his writing in an OSS blog toolkit published using a FLOSS web server [2], which would seem to be rational choices, and not delusional at all.) As far as I can tell, the only reason the business he's in right now is possible at all is that FLOSS *already* supports commercial activities. I'd bet more of his customers already know that than he realizes, or maybe he'd dial his rhetoric forward to the library software present, which is probably more like 2003 than the 1998-era FUD he's paging from the stacks here.

Oh - and I, for one, sure hope FLOSS remains an academic, basement, and spare time practice forever, because the last time I checked (two minutes ago) these things are not in opposition to commercial endeavors, either.

If you think I'm being harsh, then I'll just remind you that language *matters*, and if it didn't, you wouldn't get Richard abusing the phrase "open access" [3], either. Open source, open access, and open standards are completely different activities undertaken by completely different combinations of people in completely different circumstances. To conflate them all because of the common word "open" is shortsighted enough - to misapply the terms against the intent of the proponents of each of these separate categories of endeavors is to sow distrust.

And to speak this directly is to sow dislike, I know. Markets are conversations [4], though, right? I'll be your conversationally cranky old-school FLOSS hardliner any day.