Changes

As I have been learning more about open source over the past year, I have found myself confused and conflicted by a few discoveries. One of these came a few months ago when I discovered a website selling Open Office for $20 per digital download. The website had a table comparing feature lists between Microsoft Office and Open Office (fairly similar), and them compared their costs, some $270 for the former, and their price of $20 for the latter. My first instinct upon visiting this site was that it was malicious in its intent and thought of reporting it to the Free Software Foundation. After a little more research I learned however that that website was not violating any rules of Open Office's LGPL and Apache licenses - they were distributing the software with the source code and original licenses included. After learning that it was not illegal to sell open source software, I realized that I hardly understood what it meant or stood for.

Further, I came across three iterations of the word 'open' in this conference: open source, open data and open standards. The term 'open' is often used in popular Internet culture without being quite pinned to either of those three, and this can make things quite confusing. However, the speakers in these talks helped me reinforce that separation of meaning with their contextual uses of them.