Tuesday, November 28th, 2006, 6:42 am
Somebody Knew a Novell-type Deal was Coming
Filed under: Here are the prophetic words of Bruce Perens, as expressed in Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution (1st Edition January 1999).
The Open Source Definition
Bruce Perens
[...]
Efforts to hurt us from inside are the most dangerous. I think we’ll also see more attempts to dilute the definition of Open Source to include partially-free products, as we saw with the Qt library in KDE before Troll Tech saw the light and released an Open Source license. Microsoft and others could hurt us by releasing a lot of software that’s just free enough to attract users without having the full freedoms of Open Source. It’s conceivable that they could kill off development of some categories of Open Source software by releasing a “good enough,” “almost-free-enough” solution. However, the strong reaction against the KDE project before the Qt library went fully Open Source bodes poorly for similar efforts by MS and its ilk.
