Thursday, July 28, 2005

How to explain open source?

Had to explain to somebody the concept of open source.. So came up with using thatperson's mother recipe as an analogy... Call it open sauce...

Imagine your mom had a priceless sweet sour chicken recipe you wanted to learn.

If your mom's recipe is proprietary, that means you have to pay your mom license to use the recipe.

Your mom would be obligated to teach and provide you with support on how to make use of the recipe but you cannot make any changes to it or resell recipe.

However, if the recipe was open source, this meant that you may still have to pay for the recipe, but you can make changes to the recipe and call it yours. It also gives you the option of reselling the changed recipe.

If the recipe was free and open source, this meant that you could get the recipe for free, modify it and resell it.

Your mom is not obligated to provide you with support though..

then again, which mom wouldn't want a say in how to cook her dish and give support for free?

1 Comments:

At 2:56 PM, Blogger Unknown said...

Wouldn't the sweet & sour chicken end up with apples, turnips, sprouts, sawdust etc. in it though?

 

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