Re: [TUHS] man Macro Package and pdfmark

[Wesley Parish <wobblygong@gmail.com>]

IIRC, there was a meeting of various (FOSS) luminaries in the early or
mid-90s discussing rebranding Free Software (as in the FSF definition)
as it was far too easily misinterpreted as meaning
non-/anti-commercial. "Open Systems" had been around forever as a
description of how the Unix "ecosystem" worked - you had a common set
of APIs based on an originally common source base, and a common set of
communication protocols, that worked on a wide array of computer
systems, from real-time to supercomputers to mainframes and beyond.

With all due respect to Clem Cole, I don't recall ever seeing "open
source" used as a description of the Unix "ecosystem" during the 90s.
It was in the air with the (minimal) charges Prentice-Hall charged for
the Minix 0.x and 1.x disks and source; not dissimilar in that sense
to the charges the FSF were charging for their tapes at the time.

But all the Unix-y ads I can recall from the 90s talked about Open
Systems, and never Open Source. That came in following Linux and *BSD
radiation. But this is probably COFF's Harbour stuff ...

Wesley Parish

On 2/19/20, Steve Nickolas <usotsuki@buric.co> wrote:
> On Tue, 18 Feb 2020, Theodore Y. Ts'o wrote:
>
>> On Tue, Feb 18, 2020 at 10:43:06AM -0500, Steve Nickolas wrote:
>>> On Tue, 18 Feb 2020, arnold@skeeve.com wrote:
>>>
>>>> I don't like your use of "open source"; it is way out of skew with
>>>> how it's used today.
>>>
>>> Wasn't it always *intended* to mean the same thing as "Free Software" ?
>>
>> No, although the differences in practice are small.  "Free Software"
>> was defined by Stallman as meeting his "Four Freedoms".  Open
>> Source(tm) was derived from the Debian Free Software Guidelines, and
>> while the set of licenses which meet the "Free Software" definition
>> and those that meet the "Open Source(tm) definition mostly identical,
>> there are a few exceptions.
>>
>> I refer folks to the Wikipedia entry for more details:
>>
>> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Free_Software_Definition
>>
>> It is true that the most of the people who use Open Source instead of
>> Free Software are doing so mostly for branding reasons (e.g., Open
>> Source is considered less likely to scare the suits), but technically
>> they aren't the same.  And it is certainly true that way AT&T
>> distributed ditroff certainly isn't compliant with the Open Source
>> Definition (OSD).
>>
>> Whether or not it meets Clem's "open source" (small o, small s),
>> depends on his definition, which appears to be, "functionally, since
>> everyone back then had an AT&T source license, we're all good".
>>
>> 						- Ted
>>
>
> I always understood "open source" to mean this: you have access to the
> code, you can share it, you can modify it, and any combination of the
> above (including commercial exploitation; basically a restatement of
> Stallman's freedoms in simpler words).
>
> As any phrase gets skewed to mean something other than it was intended,
> when most people say "open source", they seem to only mean what I call
> "source-available" - i.e., that there is *some* means by which a mere
> mortal can gain access to the source, but there is no guarantee that they
> can actually DO anything with the source without getting sued into
> oblivion.  I usually say if the code doesn't offer the necessary freedom
> to make use of it. it's not "open source", it's just source.
>
> (For the record: I shifted from the GNU side to the BSD side of the debate
> about 20 years ago.  But I hold no ill will toward people on the GNU
> side.)
>
> -uso.
>