FOSS and the handicapped

Posted by on . 2 comments.

A few weeks ago I wrote this article about the economics of open source and how it affects the types of software written. Apparently I’m not the only one to have noticed.

Comments

  1. The Blog of Justice » How can you make money if it’s free? (Profit models of Free Open Source) says:
    March 23, 2006 at 5:40 pm

    [...] A while back Gas wrote an article that criticized open source software as not offering the necessary incentives to drive people to develop for deaf, blind, grandma, and other types of non-programmers who use computers. (In response to this article I wrote before that). [...]

  2. The Blog of Justice » Is free software really free? says:
    April 2, 2006 at 5:06 pm

    [...] Squeegie and I have written a number of articles on the topic of the economics of open source. One thing that I think neither of us has directly addressed is that there is a great deal of disagreement about the use of the terms “Open Source (OS),” “Open Source Software (OSS),” “Free Open Source Software (FOSS),” “Free/Libre/Open Source Software (FLOSS),” and “Doesnt Everyone Notice That Acronyms get Longer Free/Libre/Open Source Software (DENTAL FLOSS),” etc. Our good friend Richard Stallman (also known as RMS) has been militantly vocal about distinguishing between these terms over the years (then again, RMS has been known to be… eccentric). Originally, there was little confusion over the terms; Open Source refered to projects such as GNU, Linux, and Apache. As companies sprang up to profit from open source software, and as licenses appeared that were incompatible with the GPL, there arose a need to distinguish between these various classifications. Generally, people simply lump all of them together under the category of “Open Source”. [...]

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

*

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>