Free Sofware and Open Source
"Open Source" is today a polysemous term, potentially harmfull to the Free Software community.
The initial definition given by the "Open Source Initiative" was very clear and respectable. But nowadays everybody, including Microsoft, goes for Open source, or pretend to do so, as it has become a juicy market.
Most of the time, enterprises which are new comers to the Open source world, don't understand or pretend not to understand what is at stake when opening the code of a solution. They often try to artificially re-create a customer dependency : by giving unusable code which is as useless as a close code, by having closed documentation, by opening only bits of solution...
For a necessarily hurried up public decider, it is not always obvious to make the difference between good and bad Open Source. That is the reason why, instead of Open Source, I prefer talking about *reversibility* which is the key point a user must put the stress on, to avoid being locked in. A reversible software is :
- Opened from the beginning and not after a while : it has major consequences concerning the quality of code. You don't pay the same attention to the structure and readability of code when you write it alone with your own team or when it is seen by the expert eye of a community. Opening the code later is often opening it too late.
- A reversible software must be available with a documentation opened itself, and a clearly documented code to allow easy appropriation.
- The code of a reversible software must be accessible by anybody, must have an opened bug report system, an opened mailing list, and have a users community.
For all these reasons, we prefer the expression Free Software rather than Open Source when I want to talk about reversible software. The new comers, with their marketing strategies, never use this term, which makes it more appropriate in my opinion.
Apache-Ofbiz and Neogia solution are Free Software.
