Posts tagged: OPEN SOURCE

The Stanford Inquirer has an interesting interview with Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak. The whole thing is worth reading, but what caught my attention was this little digression on open source software:

I just favor the whole concept of open source as being a way that companies can be not entrapped by proprietary software. And one thing we do find is that anytime you’re using something that’s proprietary, you do wind up being pretty trapped, as much as they can trap you.

Interesting – About.com is moving to WordPress. I also learned from Matt’s blog posting, much to my surprise, that they were using Movable Type before. It feels very significant that the New York Times Company is migrating its $410-million-dollar baby over to an open source content-management platform. The usual open source components further down the stack – Apache, Linux, et al. – don’t have the same implications for feel and functionality that the content management layer does, and therefore this feels like more of a significant endorsement of open source.

In 1981, I was 13 years old and teaching myself BASIC on my TRS-80 Model III from official Radio Shack manuals – accurate, comprehensive, and terminally bland.

Into that gray scene came the book Basic Computer Games: Microcomputer Edition (edited by David Ahl of Creative Computing magazine). It changed my life.

I can’t remember now where it came from. Neither my parents, nor my friends, nor my teachers knew much about the home computer scene. It’s possible that I found out about it in Creative Computing magazine and ordered it by mail, or “borrowed” it from somewhere and forgot to return it. The book, subtitled “101 great games to play on your home computer,” was 8-bit-nerd heaven. Pages and pages of program listings in tiny, all-caps, dot matrix type, with brief introductory paragraphs. Plus, funny illustrations of strangely plausible robots. Don’t underestimate the appeal of the robots.

A few days ago, Sourceforge got a makeover:

The SourceForge.net Engineering team has completed the implementation of a new look-and-feel for the SourceForge.net site. This is the first major change to the appearance of the SourceForge.net site in more than three years. This work is part of a planned incremental revamp to the SourceForge.net site. Initial focus has been placed on revamp of page header, footer, layout; and specific improvements to the SourceForge.net front page, project summary page, login page, file release page, and download page. Launched 2005-11-14.

I’m seeing lots of links to this CNN story about the CIA learning to use publicly accessible information sources. I have one comment, not about the news, but about the language:

Mary Margaret Graham, an aide to Negroponte, told reporters better use of open source information should lead to more effective use of clandestine intelligence gathering as well.

(Emphasis mine.)

The term “open source” is being used here – not just by the reporter but, as far as I can tell from the context of the article, by the Federal government – as a synonym for “publicly accessible.” Not the same thing, of course.