I learned a lot this month. As with most lessons I learn in life, I came to this knowledge the hard way — I screwed something up, and people let me know about it.
I learned a lot this month. As with most lessons I learn in life, I came to this knowledge the hard way — I screwed something up, and people let me know about it.
It all started with last month’s GNOME and KDE articles. In the process of editing the articles for publication I changed a few things. As it turns out, I changed a few things I shouldn’t have and the authors sent me e-mail letting me know about the errors I had made.
The first error I made was in the GNOME piece. I inadvertently used the term “Open Source” to describe the GNOME project. Miguel de Icaza, one of the authors of that article, was very displeased with me for having done that. He wrote:
“My objection to the term Open Source is very simple: People pushing Open Source and companies releasing code under Open Source licenses are only interested in [having] hackers on the Internet help them to improve, extend and maintain their products: They are not looking at contributing to the existing community [ . . . ]
Open Source has given us the gifts of the APSL, the NPL, the IBM licenses, and the Qt license. All of them are Open Source licenses that have slight incompatibilities which stop developers from being able to reuse code from one project to another and to mix code from various licenses.
This is why we have to educate people about why…
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