Marketing terms
Matt Asay, over at InfoWorld, had this to say about companies (mis)using the term “open source”:
I’m growing a wee bit impatient with the major enterprise ISVs and their alleged support of open source. Oracle has been out in front of they “we love open source” hype, yet the company continually underwhelms on delivery. Last week the company announced “content management for the masses,” with accompanying quotes from OpenText calling it a “watershed event.” (I think OpenText’s chairman needs to review the definition of “watershed event” so that he doesn’t persist in misusing it.)
So what do we have in this Big New Exciting Product? A feature-weak, closed source, closed standards CMS. It doesn’t even support JSR-170, the minimal baseline for standards in the space, and is egregiously limited in how one gets content into our out of the system. It appears to allow users to have a file, a folder, and have policies one sets on folders. That’s it. It would be hard to find many other ECM systems as minimally functional as this.
Hyperic, manufacturers of IT management platforms, announced this week that it is adopting an open source model for Hyperic HQ, it’s flagship product. Following criticism from the blogosphere suggesting that companies were adopting the term “open source” as an advertising slogan without being willing to get down and dirty with the community or to relinquish much control over their code, one of their execs descended on the blog to stick up for the company, sparking a debate, on the blog and at Slashdot, over exactly what level of “openness” merited the use of the term.