I revently linked to a story by JohnSullivan about Microsoft labelling IE, Media Player, and Flash as “free software”, eventhough these programs are every thing but free. They’re just *gratis*. (2006-03-02 Copyright)
The fight for the hearts and minds of users continues. Today I saw an URL in the topic of #adium, the channel on Freenode about Adium: Julian Missig wrote an article about the recent so-called opening of the AIM network: AIM Network Now Open! Not really.
AIM Network Now Open! Not really.
As far as I can tell, this is marketing spin intended to fight Google. Now when Google says that Google Talk is open and part of an open federation, AOL can say “well, AIM is open too!” The sad part is that I’m pretty sure it’s working (as evidenced by the random links to news articles above… just look at the headlines). – Julian
I have no doubt that this Orwellian redefinition of words is happening here as it happens all over the world when power and people come into contact. 🙁
The comments rightly point to the Libjingle license¹: “The Google source code is made available under a Berkeley-style license, which means you are free to incorporate it into commercial and non-commercial software and distribute it.” ²
Now *that* is open.
And free.
#Copyright