The Disturbing Rise of Openwashing

That was kind of incoherent and rambling. It was poorly written.

There are real reasons to keep an eye on Apple and MS to make sure that they aren't abusing the Open Source community for marketing purposes. They are large companies that, should they see an advantage in doing so, they would not hesitate. This doesn't really help.

That being said...The "Open Source .Net" that they refer to in the article is actually a commerce platform from a third party that says it "takes advantage of open source Asp.net". Is that really so wrong? Asp.net has been open source for several years now. .Net core design meetings are available as streamed video if you want to join in and the license is MIT.

Also, articles that quote Stephen Vaughn-Nichols are like articles that quote FOX or ZeroHedge. I'm just automatically suspicious. Oddly, they quote him on this "open washing" but he doesn't seem to have problems with large companies publicizing the use of OpenStack or partnering with Canonical or any number of PR style things.

The term "developer applause" cited in a few links from the article, which the article claims is "bizarre" to use, in fact refers to literal applause - by the audience at WWDC, consisting largely of developers (fans of Apple already - not representatives of open source, whatever that means). The wording in the first two of those links (which are the exact same text on two different websites) makes this pretty clear.

The rest of the article is only slightly more coherent.

Apple is not an open company (by a long stretch) but they do make serious contributions to open software in many areas. Webkit, LLVM and related tools are particularly notable. In the case of other software they make fairly perfunctory source dumps.

The link between LLVM, Chris Lattner and Swift is especially promising for how Swift will be opened up so I'm optimistic that it will be done seriously and properly. And I have previously predicted that it would be opened up at some point so the announcement this week was not surprising although it was still very good news.

I am an iOS developer and I really like Swift. One of the direct benefits of it being opened in this way will be the opportunity to use it on Linux so that it can be easily deployed as server side code. Actually getting to see how it works, potentially tinker (although I don't expect to do much) potentially use it in education contexts where the requirement for a Mac is a blocker are secondary benefits personally although maybe bigger issues for others.

Um, .NET is not openwashing. CoreCLR/CoreFX are MIT Licensed, Roslyn is Apache licensed, all of them are developed publicly on GitHub. This stack fully supports running your apps on FreeBSD, OS X and Linux.

A couple years after British Petroleum blew a smoking crater into the floor of the gulf of mexico in the most-ignorant way, I stumbled across their page about their forward-thinking environmental practices.

I can google the link but it does not load for me:

http://www.bp.com/en/global/corporate/sustainability/environ...

They did not even apply for an ecological drilling permit before they pulled that stunt.

Well read Stallman, Open Source is not Free Software.