Open Source

Tristan Louis gives weight to new term that I like a lot: fauxpen. Faux in French means “false” or “fake”. So fauxpen means fake open. There has always been a lot of that going around, but since the world of tech inevitably contains more of everything, there’s more fauxpen stuff than ever. In his post Tristan issues a fresh warning about some of what he calls “a venus flytrap of technology”. His definitions:

• Fauxpenness: Calling a system or platform open while it is, when more closely scrutinized, under the tight control of its provider.

• Fauxpen system (or fauxpen platform): a system or platform that claims to be open but, upon closer examination, isn’t.

The term fauxpen has been around at least a few months. FauxpenSource.org consists entierely of this text:

Main Entry: fauxpen source
Pronunciation: \fō-pən sȯrs\

Function: noun
Etymology: a term invented by Phil Marsosudiro at a dinner party in North Carolina
Date: 2 May 2009

A description of software that claims to be open source, but lacks the full freedoms required by the Open Source Definition.

synonyms: see open core, neo-proprietary

antonyms: see Linux kernel, Apache, OpenNMS

Tristan’s scope of history goes back farther. Speaking of lock-in, he writes,

In 2006-2007, we saw that happen with SecondLife, as many developers (myself included) built software code that could run within the SecondLife world but was ultimately stuck there because you could not run it outside that world and/or run SecondLife servers on your own machines.

in 2007-2008, we saw that happen with the F8 Facebook platform, which locks your applications inside of Facebook and, while many developers have pushed to force the company to open up, tends to stay there. In 2007-today, we’re seeing the same thing with Twitter, which allows you to build whatever you want on top of it but doesn’t decentralize their approach, leaving developers potential slaves to the whims of the company. The same is true of the iPhone, which provides unusual access to the phone operating system and allows to develop interesting software on top of it but still keep developers away from being able to access basic things like calendar information via an SDK.

via linuxjournal.com