"Open core" overloaded [LWN.net]

"Open core" overloaded

Posted Jul 21, 2010 8:44 UTC (Wed) by job (guest, #670)
Parent article: Neary: Rotten to the (Open) Core?

Someone keeps trying to market his own pet term "open core", but Open Cores is one of the larger free hardware projects and is quite successful in it's niche. Google the term and you'll find that project as the number one hit, and a couple of references to that project.

Why in the world are they still going on about "open cores" as another word for open-source-as-crippleware? They haven't hijacked the term yet, and I don't they ever will. It would be downright nasty to the people who have invested time and money in Open Cores.

There are perfectly good other terms or just make up a new one ("open crippleware" anyone? or "open demo"?). I keep misreading those headlines every time they pop up and aren't actually about open hardware.

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"Open core" overloaded

Posted Jul 21, 2010 21:55 UTC (Wed) by hingo (guest, #14792) [Link] (6 responses)

"open core" seems to have been adopted by FOSS business people and analysts in 2008 and is quite established by today. I personally knew about "open cores" (and wrote about it in a book, even :-), but the term is in wide use now, what can you do.

FWIW, when I first heard about "Open Cores", I had no idea that a "core" referred to chip design. It's an easy mistake to make.

"Open core" overloaded

Posted Jul 25, 2010 6:48 UTC (Sun) by job (guest, #670) [Link] (5 responses)

If by "wide use" you mean a handful of blogs. Just Google the term. They have just now made a dent in the first page of results with a mention at Gartner, despite the fact that their blogs are highly interlinked to skew search results in their favor. I think it's downright rude.

"Open core" overloaded

Posted Jul 25, 2010 12:24 UTC (Sun) by hingo (guest, #14792) [Link] (4 responses)

There is no absolute truth in Google anymore, the results are much more personalized than they once were. I get 6 search results for the business model term, 1 unrelated Java result and 3 for opencores.org.

If you want people to use some other term, why not contact those who use it. Personally, I think it is just too late.

"Open core" overloaded

Posted Jul 31, 2010 20:56 UTC (Sat) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (3 responses)

That might not have been personalization. You could just have had a different set of machines win the race to provide you with answers. Google is a massively distributed system: in such systems, cross-node consistency is the first thing to go.

"Open core" overloaded

Posted Aug 1, 2010 11:32 UTC (Sun) by hingo (guest, #14792) [Link] (2 responses)

"There is no standard google any more." 57 personalization signals. Ditto FB. @elipariser of moveon talks about "filter bubbles" at #pdf10
twitter.com/timoreilly

Since "job" is clearly active in open hardware, and I've been active in the open source related debate, I would still guess on personalization as that makes more sense than assuming that we got well personalized results just due to chance.

"Open core" overloaded

Posted Aug 8, 2010 13:13 UTC (Sun) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (1 responses)

But you *do* get different results in consecutive search queries due to chance. Several systems with slightly different datasets race to give you results, and whichever happens to get there first is the one you see the results from (very roughly).

Don't assume that all variability is due to some sort of evil personalization. Some of it is an efficiency hack.

"Open core" overloaded

Posted Aug 11, 2010 7:31 UTC (Wed) by job (guest, #670) [Link]

Interesting. I never knew your Google results were so very much personalized. That will give the SEOs something to loose sleep over.