"Nicole Engard" <nicole.engard@...> writes:
> As most of you know, I am not the Open Source Evangelist for LibLime.
> I'm looking to put together a list of common questions/misconceptions
> about open source and their answers/corrections. I'm going to use
> this list in presentations as I go around libraryland educating
> librarians about what open source is and how it can be used in
> libraries.
>
> One example of a question I got lately was "Open source, is that like
> tags and stuff?"
>
> If you have any good ones - or answers you'd like spread to your
> fellow librarians, please let me know.
One assumption I see pretty often is: "Open source -- oh, that's the
anti-commercial alternative stuff, like Linux, right?"
People unfamiliar with open source often assume that the
non-restrictive licenses must mean it's inherently non-commercial, or
even anti-commercial. Of course, people working in open source know
better :-), given that many of them are paid to work on it, and
they're also aware of things like MySQL being bought by Sun for real
money, etc.
There's no relation between whether software is commercialized and
whether it's open source -- they're two independent variables. (This
is probably true of all content in the long run, actually, but at the
moment it's most obviously true of software.)
Nicole, I hope you'll post your list somewhere public when you're
done!
Best,
-Karl
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