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by bensummers 5872 days ago
The objection of the article is to people claiming something is "open" when it's not. Open implies working with products from more than one vendor.

So there's nothing wrong with Microsoft's behaviour, apart from how they're describing what they're doing. A lovely example is their Office Open XML formats, which only work with Microsoft products because the specification includes things like "Behaves like Microsoft Word 97".
1 comments
ubernostrum 5872 days ago
Open implies working with products from more than one vendor.

But "open source" does not imply that -- it implies that you will have access to the source code, and the rights to redistribute and to make/distribute derivative works.

Or, to maybe drive the point home in a different way: if, say, a game is released under an OSI-approved license, but for sake of speed contains some inline assembly, would you then claim it's not really "open" since it only runs on a single CPU architecture?

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