A think tank's view of free software

Posted May 9, 2007 21:13 UTC (Wed) by sepreece (guest, #19270)
In reply to: A think tank's view of free software by nix
Parent article: A think tank's view of free software

"I suspect the report was written by someone who didn't know what they were talking about..."

This comment, and a number of others, seems to misunderstand the nature of hte report. This is not a white paper by a research firm, it's a report from a workshop at which various kinds of participants, from various companies, talked together about FLOSS-related issues from their individual perspectives, which were then summarized by the organizers.

So, the whole point is that if some of these comments are clueless, that reflects the thinking of the participants, who are people with a lot of money to spend on IT and software in general. Their opinions should be interesting to people who want to make money on their FLOSS activities.

If the workshop participants say there is a shortage of support, our editor misses the point in saying the participants should view that as an opportunity. The point is that the *readers* of the report should view that as an opportunity.

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A think tank's view of free software

Posted May 9, 2007 21:58 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (2 responses)

It was more that the sentence I quoted was plainly written by someone who
*didn't know what the words they were using meant* or at least not how
they are generally used. It's the same sort of linguistic red flag that
gets waved if I see someone refer to `source codes' (oops, that's a mass
noun).

Perhaps it's simpy that the workshop report was put together by someone
who didn't know what the words meant (which is rather odd but not
inexcusable).

(Yes, it's nasty and prejudiced of me. I know. ;) )

A think tank's view of free software

Posted May 9, 2007 22:33 UTC (Wed) by allesfresser (guest, #216) [Link]

I'm glad someone else cares about mass nouns besides me... ;)

A think tank's view of free software

Posted May 10, 2007 16:31 UTC (Thu) by sepreece (guest, #19270) [Link]

"It was more that the sentence I quoted was plainly written by someone who
*didn't know what the words they were using meant*"

You didn't actually quote a sentence, so it's hard to pin down what your objection was. The quote in the report that had the phrase "greater interoperability" was the editor's summarization of discussion. It followed a quote: "Doug Harr remarked that interoperability is the single biggest challenge for adopting open source at Ingres." He presumably has some experience with the problem.

The complete paragraph in the report provides more comments from the discussion.

[I share the concern about mass nouns, though most of the time I see them in text written by non-native speakers. I'm sure my French makes me sound like an idiot when I'm brave enough to use it.]