Someone else nitpicked for me

I couldn’t properly organise my thoughts when trying to write something about Bill Gates’ use of the phrase “commercial [software].” Work started to heat up and I hadn’t been able to think about my blog at all lately. Well, someone else wrote an essay on the subject just after Christmas and it’s much better than what I was going to write.

For example, the U.S. government’s own official definition of “commercial item” makes it clear that most FLOSS programs are considered commercial items. The Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR) System is widely used for acquisition, and it has a very detailed definition of the term “Commercial item”.

…

The licenses, and the discussions surrounding both licenses and projects, also make clear that developers in FLOSS projects typically have no problems with commercial development and support, even if you use the narrower definition of “for-profit” for “commercial”. Indeed, many projects are established by commercial organizations as a kind of consortia (e.g., X Windows and Apache), while others are established by single commercial organizations (e.g., MySQL and Qt).

The essay is dry but well written and supported. It’s available on David A. Wheeler’s personal webpage. I’ve never heard of him before but I’ve just subscribed to his blog.