[conspire] (forw) Re: You're quoted. :)

[Rick Moen]

----- Forwarded message from Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com> -----

Date: Mon, 26 Mar 2018 16:06:38 -0700
From: Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com>
To: Destinyland <destinyland at gmail.com>
Subject: Re: You're quoted. :)
Organization: If you lived here, you'd be $HOME already.

Quoting Destinyland (destinyland at gmail.com):

> All this to say that there's some serious confusion out there, and it's
> really good you were here to throw credible and authoritiative words into
> the mix to start cutting through it all.   ;)

Delighted to help.

> So the piece is up.  Amazingly, Linus Torvalds answered the email I sent
> asking for a quote, so you and he are quoted side by side. :)

Well, gosh (he says, not swearing like a sailor for a change).

> What's disturbing is there's one guy -- a former database manager for a
> casino up by Clear Lake <http://hyperlogos.org/page/Resum-Martin-Espinoza>
> -- who's apparently really proud that he heard Caldera say "open source
> code model" before 1998.  He reached out to the author of that press
> release who tells him Caldera (and Linus) used the term "broadly"
> <http://hyperlogos.org/blog/drink/term-Open-Source> -- by which he seems to
> mean "in a much more broad way than it's used today," but which sounds like
> he's saying they used it *often*.  [Even Linus, for example, took "broadly"
> to mean that he was being remembered as having used the term "widely."]
> 
> And that publicist's tenure at Caldera extended to 2001 -- so I'm sure he
> did eventually attend the Open Source pavilions at Comdex.  But I'm not
> sure he understands the difference between what Caldera did and what true
> Open Source code looks like -- even to this day.  (He's currently the
> pointy-haired boss at a web applications company
> <https://www.linkedin.com/in/lyleball/>.)  It's possible that without any
> malice on his part, he's nonetheless conflating that 1996 press release
> with the larger open source movement.   And then that former casino
> database manager is thrilled to have his conspiracy theory validated....

As the latter half of the discussion on pigdog-l suggested, there wasn't
any malice, let alone intent to deceive, on the part of early users
trying to make the term 'open source' mean what is now called
source-available or viewable-source proprietary software.  For one
thing, the term 'open' or 'open systems' meaning merely interoperable
had a long tradition.  For another, most folks other than industry
lawyers weren't yet very clear about software licensing and what rights
grants really mattered.

It turned out, what Stallman and the Free Software Foundation had been
saying since 1984 was prescient and correct, but they were so militant
and such piss-port public relations people that the general run of
opinion was 'I think software rights grants are important but at least
I'm not as extreme as _those_ guys'.  And it simply took until the late
1990s to learn why FSF _was_ right from repeated failures.

I'll tell you when I finally learned.  It was a really nice cross
between a word processor and a DTP program called DeScribe.  The
small sponsoring company was DeScribe, Inc., barely more than a cottage
industry of a guy named Jim Lennane, and the product was a small miracle
of clean and advanced design, and releases were available for Win16,
Win32, and OS/2.  After about five years, and the release of DeScribe
release 5.0, the company went broke, though.  
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/11/half-an-operating-system-the-triumph-and-tragedy-of-os2/4/
I was one of many distraught
DeScribe users who kept inquiring about the _rights_ to continue
maintanence of the DeScribe codebase, by anyone, anywhere, but possibly
by purchasing the copyrights and setting up a software collective to
keep it alive.  And nothing.  With some work, you could track down the
apparent new rights owners, some business middlemen, but their attitude
was 'Please FedEx your wallets to us, so we can guesstimate how big
suckers you are and set an asking price.'

But the point is, the disappointment of something I relied on suddenly
vanishing from the market without the userbase or potential outside
developers having any say in the matter is something that had happened
to all of us _before_, and the DeScribe fiasco was merely the last
straw.  We suddenly reassessed what was necessary in the way of legal
rights grants to ensure that a software project could always be lawfully 
continued -- forked -- by outsiders, and, mirabile dictu, it was pretty
much exactly what Stallman was bellowing about but getting no traction
because his and FSF's idea of public relations was abysmal and
self-defeating.

So, the truth of the matter was that when OSI was founded, I and many
like me were already a waiting coterie of people ready to say 'Yeah,
that.  Exactly that.'  And we'd already rejected completely the Caldera 
(et alii) notion of 'open' as effectively useless, as yet another
non-solution to the DeScribe problem.

Imagine, to illustrate the issue, how little difference Caldera-style
'open' code would have made to the DeScribe, Inc. bankruptcy and
dissolution.  All of registered DeScribe users who paid our $99 would
have had possession of a CD with the three OS ports of DeScribe 5.0 in
binary format, plus access to matching source code.  Software copyright
law gave us the implied right of private modification and to recompile
privately -- but no legal right to distribute either DeScribe or our
modified versions.  We could lawfully distribute our modification
patchsets (if we created those) any way we wanted, as copyright law
clases those as analogous to commentary, _but_ the main point is that
nobody would have the right to take over full maintenance, and nobody
(except the uninterested new owners in bankruptcy) would have the right
to distribute new (or old) versions of the software.

The _real_ open source movement, identical to the free software movement
except for the substitution of competent marketing[1], was a huge 'Well, 
screw that, bro' to the whole model of repeatedly buying into
proprietary software and then repeatedly getting horribly disappointed
when a tool you relied on vanished from the market for dumb reasons, and 
the only people legally permitted to revive it didn't care.  It wasn't
the money; I'd have happily paid another $99 for new releases once in a
while.  It was the irrational, repeated body-blows to computing autonomy.


[1] I'm not impressed by my friend Richard Stallman's practiced speech
about how the Open Source movement is completely different because it
lacks any commitment to software freedom.  It's bullshit and
self-justifying propaganda.  He just doesn't want to admit that an 
outside group not hobbled by PR incompetence took his exact same
principles and was immediately successful.

> 

----- End forwarded message -----