Amanda Brock is a pretty well-known name in open-source, so imagine my surprise when I discovered her byline on a tech site that’s most known for publishing a weekly list of top apps for Windows. A big thumbs-up to Beta News for this.
Sometimes you just have no idea where you’re going to find a bit of a gem on the internet.
For example, usually one of the last places I’d go looking for an insightful article on open-source that’s actually written by someone who knows a whit or two about the subject, is Beta News — which loves to report on Windows but often gets it wrong when it drops into the world of open-source, somehow managed to snag an article — What’s In a Name — Why You Should Care What Open-Source Is — by Amanda Brock.
If the name is familiar to you, but you just can’t quite place it, Amanda has been the CEO of OpenUK, the not-for-profit organization representing the UK’s open technology sector, for about the last five years. Not only that, she’s been on the advisory board of KDE for most of the last four years, has been the European representative for Open Invention Network since 2013, and was a board member at Open Source Initiative until July of this year.
She does a great job of explaining why a lot of stuff that people are trying to sell as open-source ain’t even open-source at all. I recommend the read, and it might even be something to want to pass on to folks you know who can’t understand why we call some licenses “fauxpen” (or why OpenAI has nothing whatsoever do do with openness).
You can read the entire article here: What’s in a name — why you should care what open source is
Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux
