“James Maguire, Datamation’s managing editor, claims he has no
interest in software whose source code is available for editing.
‘I’m not a software engineer,’ he says. ‘If I can’t grab it off the
shelf, I can’t use it.’“He’s half-joking, of course. But he echoes the opinion of many
people outside the free and open source software (FOSS) community
about what its efforts are about. Ask average computer users what
FOSS is about, and, if they’ve even heard of it, they’ll probably
say something about the source code being publicly available.“The problem is that the community has done a deplorable job of
explaining itself to outsiders. Focused on the immediate concerns
of developers, the Open Source Definition lists only one right out
of ten (to redistribute the software) that might be of interest to
average computer users…”