[ILUG] setting up a mail server

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Ciaran (cj at nologic.org):

> In Rick's initial mail he claimed I was attempting to con the original 
> poster. 

Oh dear.  I see no such post, here.

He seems, rather, to be making a reference to a private e-mail.  But I
didn't attribute such motives to anyone in private mail _either_.  
(I made a passing remark that I don't appreciate attempts to con people
about the nature of open source, but didn't say that was his intent.)

Airing private e-mail on mailing lists generally strikes me as a bad
idea for quite a lot of reasons.  And attempting to paraphrase actually
makes matters worse:  Suppose you accidentally misrepresent what someone
says?

Anyhow, I'm sure Ciaran is a fine fellow, and I certainly would not, and
do not, impugn his motives.

But I do wonder how he could imagine I was accusing him of conning
someone else when he was writing solely to _me_.  That doesn't seem to
make a whole lot of sense.

> What I *meant* is that it is proprietary for the reasons you cited,
> but open source in that the source is, well, for want of a better
> word, open.

We call that viewable-source or source-available software.  It's a
category of proprietary code.  (None of these terms is pejorative, just
descriptive of the licence categories.)

> If a piece of software provides the source code freely, allows
> modifications for personal use and patches for distribution but does
> not have an OSI sticker, does this mean that I cannot use the words
> "open" and "source" in that order in the same sentence as that product
> without fear of reprisals?

If by "reprisals" you mean people saying "Please don't call proprietary
software open source, because isn't", then I suppose so.  But that seems
more than a little melodramatic.

> Or is "Open Source" proprietary? 

To the same degree that the word "down" is proprietary because
people will consider someone bizarre who uses it to mean "up".

That rhetoric is _really_ reaching, methinks.

-- 
Cheers,                          "The only good goth is a shoggoth...."
Rick Moen                           -- Alistair J.R. Young, in r.a.sf.w.r-j
rick at linuxmafia.com