[bayindirh]

Between the cross-licensing of hardware IP blocks and 3rd party software which never sees the light of the day, hardware manufacturers work like a secretive three letter agency to be able to control every part of their ecosystem.

I tend to understand where this comes from. It's part business, part continuation of old customs and the way they did it and being able to control obsolescence to be able push new things to the market.

However, if the periphery of the software you put out is closed source, even though this periphery is optional, it's not fair or ethical to say it's 100% open source.

From my perspective, it can be said it's open core, and it's pretty fair, and acceptable in my case, but writing 100% Open Source* (*: 100% of the open part of the software stack, exceptions apply) is not fair game. It's misleading.

[ddlsmurf]

Seems a bunch are angry about this, honestly, 100% of what they made/control is open source was a good enough bar for me. Specially if all closed components are optional. I value the flexibility of being able to use or not even closed stuff. It's unclear to me what the issue is, false advertisement ? This is as good as it gets for things like this, maybe the "100%" was indelicate, but I wouldn't go so far as misleading. I can also understand the hardware companies, history has shown that the vast majority of industry actors have a purely parasitical relation to open source, and have no qualms copying/stealing IP.

[bayindirh]

Personally, I'm not angry. On the contrary, I'm pretty neutral about closed-source, optional add-ons. I started playing/working with computers pretty early, and the current state is an utopia when compared to olden times in terms of Free and Open Source software (OTOH, both Free Software and Open Source is under heavy attack because of many reasons I won't enter here).

What bothers me is "100%" part of the open source claim. I personally like the Debian model a lot. It's DFSG compliant by default, and if non-free software is needed, it's attainable. Debian is "as Free as you want, as closed as you need".

I see, new Pebble follows the same model, and it's perfectly fine, but branding it as 100% Open Source is not.

I'll not discuss hardware companies. It's a can of worms that doesn't belong to that reply. Let's say while I understand some of their reservations, these reservation doesn't change that they're greedy and selfish (beyond acceptable limits).