OStatic

Has the terminology finally evolved in the debate over who's open source? It would seem so. After years of haggling over the essence of open source, free software or any other moniker, Simon Phipps gets right to the point in A Remarkable Reversal - his critique of Richard Stallman's joint letter to the EC regarding Oracle and MySQL.

For the first time, there seems to be a growing concensus that an OSI-compliant license alone is not enough to define one's position on the openness spectrum. As Phipps notes, community governance, trademark and copyright ownership and administration, the percentage of core function in the commons... need to be taken together to get the full view.