Hi,
Metaphors when done right can be powerful to convey an idea. There’s a short article with some good metaphors:
http://www.ethicalconsumer.org/ethicalreports/internetreport/whatisopensourc...
Transparency: a car.
An open source license is like having the right to lift your car bonnet to view the engine. If you use software but can’t see what it’s doing behind the scenes, then it’s impossible to know what it’s doing with your data or even if it’s secure. By making code viewable by all, it’s much easier to spot and fix security flaws and bugs, which is why many security standards, such as password encryption, are open source.
Modification: a house
Open source is like buying a house and being free to decorate it however you want, to build extensions or demolish walls. Closed-source software strictly limits what you can do with it.
Accumulative: DNA:
Like a genome that keeps evolving, or the way academia builds upon prior knowledge, open source is a way of ‘standing on the shoulder of giants’, by building on what exists, rather than starting from scratch. This applies to everything from the code at the heart of software and powering websites to design elements, which can develop in an accumulative way, with anyone free to improve on the work of those previously.
Collaborative: a coop
Like a co-op, but without membership. While code authors may still own copyright on their code, by providing an open license, assets are kept public and the user community can offer improvements, fixes, language translations, design improvements, documentation and so on. Eric S Raymond describes open source development as “a great babbling bazaar of differing agendas and approaches out of which a coherent and stable system could seemingly emerge only by a succession of miracles”.
Democratic: a landslide
Like a democracy where anyone can set up their own country if they don’t like the leader. Open source projects have core maintainers who have the final say over suggestions and contributions from the user community but if they aren’t responsive, people can ‘fork’ the software and build their own ‘branch’. The content management system Joomla, for instance, was forked from Mambo, after its corporate owners started charging developers big fees.
I suppose we’re missing the analogy between a cooking recipe and source code for the list to be complete :-)
-- Hugo Roy, Free Software Foundation Europe, <www.fsfe.org> Deputy Coordinator, FSFE Legal Team, <www.fsfe.org/legal> Coordinator, FSFE French Team, <www.fsfe.org/fr>
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