[OSGeo-Discuss] Is it possible for properitery GIS vendor to market thier properitery product as Open ?

[María Arias de Reyna]

Hi,

On Thu, Mar 23, 2017 at 2:52 AM, Jody Garnett <jody.garnett at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Considering android is marketed as open, yes this is possible in our
> industry as well :)
>

Android is open: https://source.android.com/source/downloading.html

You can download the code, modify it, build it, use it and redistribute it.
Some versions of Android may have private drivers or extensions, but
Android itself is open. And free.

https://source.android.com/source/licenses.html#android-open-source-project-license


Keep in mind we have several definitions of "open", even "open source" does
> not match the same meaning of open advocated by the free software
> foundation.
>
> In our industry specifically we have open standards, allowing many
> proprietary (and open source) products to be marketed as "open" (in the
> sense that they support a standard allowing integration in a larger
> systems).
>


>From my perspective, that's perverting a very clear definition of open. We
all had a very plain and specific meaning of open until some companies
started to pervert it for their own evil purposes.


*What's in a name? that which we call a roseBy any other name would smell
as sweet;*

That which we call closed software will still stink as closed, even if you
call  it open.


>
> By the same token a proprietary vendor can define an API with license
> terms allowing customers and third-party vendors to create additional
> functionality that extends their software. This is the meaning of "open
> platform" I think you are referring to. There is a lot more meaning behind
> "open platform" though, ideally you have a way for those third-party
> vendors to turn a profit thus motivating their continued participation in
> your platform.
>

That's not an open platform. That's having an accesible API for you
services. Please, do not confuse the terms.


This is a rough-and-tumble competition - we can no longer use the short
> hand "open" to capture what we do here at OSGeo. We are going to have to
> wade into these debates with a strong story and clear examples from our
> community.  We should also expect platforms to be built up around our open
> source projects (say Carto being built around PostGIS). This is a great way
> to ensure these projects stay  viable, as long as we keep everyone involved
> sufficiently encouraged/valued/funded.
>
> Oh and to answer your question, the mislead customers may of confused
> "open source" with "open platform". If we want the distinction clear in the
> market we need to use organizations such as OSGeo to push that messag
>

I strongly disagree. We should use the word free as much as we can to get
our space back, but also we should enfoce recovering the real meaning of
open. Because leaving "open" to this false open software advocators will
mean losing an important battle. The next thing will be not being able to
call open to things that are also free.

This is for our own good: if we leave "open" become dirty, we will have
problems even when trying to explain to our customers why open software is
better than closed software.
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