- OpenAI
- OpenText
- OpenVMS
- OpenServer
- OpenEdge
- OpenDrive
- etc.
Because they can and the only ethics a company has are those imposed by laws.
Open your wallet and fill ours
its clearly a marketing gimmick. to lend credibility to their products by stealing the goodwill associated with open source initiatives.
its a marketing trick for geeks. these people are jerks.
Pure speculation : the idea of open source sells. It’s more appealing than the alternative.
I’m pretty sure someone like my parents has no idea what that even means, though I guess many of these companies might just be targeting younger people more likely to know
Surely the idea of open or free is always going to play better than closed, locked down and proprietary…? idk
Hey, people view something as locked down and proprietary as the Apple ecosystem as a good thing, so not really sure about that.
Some of these names (like OpenVMS) are from before the term “open source software” was coined (which was in 1998). They refer instead to “open systems”, meaning computer systems with published specifications, interoperable hardware, portable software, etc. – things that might seem like obvious choices now, but were not in early business computing.
Yeah, OpenBSD predates “open source” by a few years and some people actually found the name weird at the time because there was such a strong association with “Open” being used to mean things like “controlled by an industry consortium rather than a single company”.
There was a joke in one of the BOFH episodes (Bastard Operator from Hell for those unfamiliar, look it up if you don’t know it, it’s worth it) that went like this:
“So I tell him, ‘you can’t port Debian to a car computer, it’s not an open system’ ha ha ha ha”
That joke was not about the car computer.
Even a heavily proprietary system like iOS is much more of an “open system” in this sense than old mainframes. It uses standard networking protocols, supports programming languages that have published specifications, third-party hardware exists …
