Re: [COFF] [TUHS] 386BSD released

On Fri, Jul 16, 2021 at 12:02:39PM -0600, Grant Taylor via COFF wrote: I'm really not sure what was the blocker. Hesiod had been used in production at MIT Project Athena for a number of years, and had been written up as papers at Usenix and LISA, and had been vetted by the IETF and the specification was in RFC 1035. The patches were available on MIT ftp servers, and there were one or two other sites who were using it. I didn't actually write the Hesiod patches; it was originally written by Steve Dyer, who was a full-time engineer on loan from IBM to Project Athena. But this was after Steve had returned to IBM, and I was maintaining the name servers running at MIT. I had tried communicating via email, and to be honest the patches weren't all that complicated. But I didn't have any luck, and finally Paul invited me to his house. Whatever the reason, if people require physical presence to develop trust, or something else --- it just doesn't scale. You can have the technology, but if people insist on wanting do the whole "dog sniffing another dog's butt" before trusting a code contribution, that's not a particularly healthy pattern for an active, vibrant open source project. I actually think there are three different dimensions. * Source Availability * Licensing which conforms to the Open Source Definition * Contributions Accepted (in practice) These are not binary, of course; Microsoft might make only part of its sources available to various companys or countries. But trying to claim that this is "Open Source" is just going to confuse people, because that is *not* how most people in the industry use that term today. So that's why I would suggest the terminology "Source Available". The third dimension, whether or not Contributions are accepted, is also an important distinction. And again, it's not a binary. It's not that it was *impossible* for me to get a new feature into BIND. It just required a physical visit in order to make it happen. You may want "Open Source" to mean something else, but the common language in the industry is that it means "License which conforms to the Open Source Definition". That's how it's been used since 1998[1]. Companies have Open Source Compliance Offices/Officers. The name was chosen specifically because "Free Software" was considered too scary, and radicalized. For too many people, brought to mind a creepy man who would talk about making all programming be funded by the government (Socialism!), and wearing a disk platter as "Saint IGNUcius". So it was very much a rebranding effort, taking the Debian Free Software Guidelines, changing it slightly, calling it the Open Source Definition, and then using the term Open Source. For all intents and purposes, the set of software which was "Free Software" and the set of software which was "Open Source" are identical. "Open Source" was a name that was picked so as not to scare the suits[1]. [1] https://opensource.org/history You can try to argue that it should have a different etymology, but that's not how the name was chosen, from a historical standpoint. And trying to change the definition after the fact is likely going to be as successful as Stallman's attempt to rename Linux to be GNU/Linux. Trying to dictate to the people who came up with and use a name that they should change the name, or change the definition, without their consent, will likely lead to your being ignored in the best case, or mocked in the worst. Cheers, - Ted