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

[James Klassen]

Historically, labeling software "open" has meant built to open standards
that anyone else could theoretically implement.  For example OpenLook,
OpenSTEP, The Open Software Foundation (the group behind the Motif X11
toolkit - and the lack of a free and open source implementation was a major
stumbling block in porting lots of existing software to Linux prior to
lessrif and then the general switch to GTK), X/Open.

It wasn't until the late 90's that "open" started being used as shorthand
for "open source" largely due to the influence of esr (Eric S. Raymond) as
a pragmatic response to the commonly held (and in my opinion incorrect)
view at the time that free software as promoted by RMS (Richard Stallman)
wasn't suitable for use by businesses.

I know this may be seen as many as semantic minutiae, but this email thread
seems to be getting at the now decades old argument about the differences
between "open source" and free (as in libre) software.  This
differentiation is well covered online, so I will not repeat it here.

So in my view of the terms:

Can a proprietary system be "open"?  Yes and based on historical usage even
closed source systems can be labeled "open".

Can a proprietary system be "open source"?  Again historically yes.  As an
extreme example of this, I believe once upon a time Microsoft open-sourced
many parts of Windows but with an extremely restrictive license and
limitations that certainly did and do not meet the norms of the open source
community.  IIRC The early versions of Qt also were also a less extreme
example of this.

Can proprietary software be free/libre?  No, by definition.
On Mar 23, 2017 04:21, "María Arias de Reyna" <delawen+osgeo at gmail.com>
wrote:

>
> On Thu, Mar 23, 2017 at 9:30 AM, Luí­s Moreira de Sousa <
> luis.de.sousa at protonmail.ch> wrote:
>
>>
>> I believe we need a regulatory framework for "open source" labelling;
>> something like the EU regulation 1169/2011 [2] for organic farming. It not
>> only sets the criteria for farmers to label their products, as it actively
>> prevents others from falsely claiming to that criteria.
>>
>
>
> +1 Restarting the movement for the european chapter to be able to lobby
> for this...
>
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