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Comment by nickff

20 hours ago

Appending ‘development’ seems like a significant departure from ‘vanilla’ “Open Source” to me, and wouldn’t all development be ‘closed-source’ at least between commits, if not between pull requests?

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nickff

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layer8  20 hours ago

See https://opensource.org/about/history-of-the-open-source-init... under ‘Coining “Open Source”’:

The conferees believed the pragmatic, business-case grounds that had motivated Netscape to release their code illustrated a valuable way to engage with potential software users and developers, and convince them to create and improve source code by participating in an engaged community. The conferees also believed that it would be useful to have a single label that identified this approach and distinguished it from the philosophically- and politically-focused label “free software.”

From the beginning it was about promoting the model of developing software in an open community. The licensing is a means to that, but the motivating idea is to have open-source development.

And Netscape’s release of the source code, what lead to Mozilla, was prompted by the “bazaar” ideas presented by RMS.

  • throwaway17_17  13 hours ago

    I think you have confused RMS (Richard Stallman) and ESR (Eric S. Raymond). It was ESR that coined and popularized the cathedral and bazaar development analogy and terminology. It was also ESR who was at the conference your comment is discussing. RMS is “free software”, copyleft, and GNU. ESR is “open source” and the author of ‘The Cathedral and the Bazaar”.

    Of course, I could have misunderstood your comment, if so, mea culpa and feel free to ignore.

  • nickff  17 hours ago

    The 'bazaar' system is a wonderful methodology, but there is a place for the 'cathedral', and it is no less open source.

    • layer8  16 hours ago

      I was arguing against this statement: "Open source does not mean, and has never meant, ongoing development nor development with the community." It is simply false that it has never meant that.

      While you can have a cathedral-like development and publish it under an open-source license, that's not what RMS was talking about in his essay.

      I'm also not arguing about what is good or bad, but about what was meant by the term "open source" when it was introduced, and how it is still understood by many people since then.