compatibility and the OSD

Chuck Swiger cswiger at mac.com
Tue Sep 28 20:52:06 UTC 2004


Rick Moen wrote:
[ ... ]
> Are you looking for someone to argue with?
[ ... ]
> Your humble opinion has been duly noted and discarded.
[ ... ]
> And again.
[ ... ]
> No, it's not.  It just proves something about the management in
> question, which I'll be polite and not voice.
[ ... ]

Rick, insulting someone repeatedly and then claiming to be polite is 
dishonest.  Could you please take this obnoxious diatribe to private email and 
spare the members of this mailing list more of your clever sarcasm?

Failing that, you would resemble a polite and reasonable human being more if 
you acknowledged other's opinions (even if they differ from yours) with the 
minimal respect one might expect them to show your own opinions.  In case this 
point is not clear to you, most societies expect the level of courtesy shown 
even between strangers to be greater than zero.

I agree with Alex Rousskov's point.  There are plenty of people on this list 
who were doing open source long before Bruce Perens came up with the 
predecessor to the OSD in 1997.  You yourself have acknowledged that 
historical licenses like the GPL or the Python license-- which may not exactly 
match a literal reading of the OSD requirements-- are still OSD-approved, 
which means there is some latitude or imprecision which is inherent to the 
meaning of "open source".

That being said, I don't have an opinion with regard to Marius Alves, other 
than if they are using the OSI logo or refer to Open Source as a trademark, 
then they do need to pay heed to the OSD.

-- 
-Chuck




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