Open Source Bickering

My colleague and friend Scott Herndon today pointed me at the latest discussion of the proper use of the term "open source" that has broken out recently. This argument started in June on the blog, though it goes back much farther in the real world outside the blogosphere.

The arguments are mildly interesting, though largely academic. But it seemed to me after I read a good many of the comments and thought about it a bit that open source vendors arguing about the proper definition of open source is a little like a pissing contest where nobody's buying the beer.

While I sympathize with Michael Tiemann in his role with the Open Source Initiative (OSI), his attempt to preserve the brand "Open Source" is fruitless. It's not a brand. Never was. Never will be. It's not protectible. At best he's got a decent meme to protect and I might even agree it deserves protection. But open source will always mean different things to different people.

Scott and I were discussing it today in terms of the need we have on one project. We don't intend to use the source code of an Open Source project in our work. What we're looking for are some ideas about issues to be covered, approaches that have been tried, etc. We're not likely to use any actual code from any Open Source app we choose to download and look at. The last two words are key to us: we want to look at source to get ideas about alternative ways of doing things anyone doing a particular type of app needs to do.

So we don't really care what license is being used; our concern is, "Can we read the source?" If we can, it's open source enough for our needs.

Maybe the problem is that the broad range of Open Source needs is too big to be covered by one brand or meme.