Quote of the week [LWN.net]

Every time a company uses “proprietary” to describe how good a feature is I vomit. “Square’s proprietary, industry-leading risk detection”

— Alex Gaynor

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Quote of the week

Posted Oct 17, 2013 1:01 UTC (Thu) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (3 responses)

Why? "Proprietary" simply means that this technology can not be used by other competitors. It's a neutral statement in itself.

Quote of the week

Posted Oct 17, 2013 6:56 UTC (Thu) by dvdeug (guest, #10998) [Link]

But it's not being used neutrally; it's being implied to be a positive. Personally, "proprietary" also means to me that it's unstandardized and carefully examined by a very limited group of people invariably excluding most of the best in the industry.

Quote of the week

Posted Oct 17, 2013 12:24 UTC (Thu) by cesarb (subscriber, #6266) [Link] (1 responses)

See the Jargon File, http://catb.org/jargon/html/P/proprietary.html

> 1. In marketroid-speak, superior; implies a product imbued with exclusive magic by the unmatched brilliance of the company's own hardware or software designers.

> 2. In the language of hackers and users, inferior; implies a product not conforming to open-systems standards, and thus one that puts the customer at the mercy of a vendor able to gouge freely on service and upgrade charges after the initial sale has locked the customer in. Often used in the phrase “proprietary crap”.

Quote of the week

Posted Oct 19, 2013 6:03 UTC (Sat) by jtc (guest, #6246) [Link]

" In marketroid-speak, superior; implies a product imbued with exclusive magic by the unmatched brilliance of the company's own hardware or software designers."

Perhaps an appropriate addendum to this description would be that such terminology is often used by confidence tricksters. And although most tech-marketing teams are probably not doing anything technically illegal, their performance often reminds one (or, at least, me) of a confidence game.

Quote of the week

Posted Oct 17, 2013 16:14 UTC (Thu) by acunningham (guest, #9368) [Link]

Perhaps because we're not the intended audience; investors are?

Quote of the week

Posted Oct 18, 2013 11:36 UTC (Fri) by jezuch (subscriber, #52988) [Link]

> Every time a company uses “proprietary” to describe how good a feature is I vomit. “Square’s proprietary, industry-leading risk detection”

Also: "patent-pending".