Re: [LAU] Dishonest marketing and the term "Open Source"

On 10/18/2014 11:31 AM, Joe Hartley wrote: Unfortunately, now that McMillen has been funded, there's really no recourse other than suing him. The only angle left that I can think of is that Open Source is a trademark... but an unsatisfied funder/purchaser would have to convince OSI to send him a cease and desist letter, and the most that seems likely to come of that would be that he'd take the word "source" out, since "open" means nothing (remember "Office Open XML", whose spec actually referred to unpublished Office 95 code for the proper implementation of some of its features but was nonetheless accepted by some rubber-stamp organization as a "standard"?) It looks like McMillen may have already changed "Open Source" to "open architecture" in his marketing, so the only recourse FOSS supporters have is to take to the review sections on store sites... and at least on Amazon, he never even uses the word "open" as a description. Just another Kickstarter bait and switch, I'm afraid. I won't back another non-game project without either some kind of binding promise to provide the source, or an actual constantly-updated github repo with an active community and respected contributors during the campaign itself. That's if I ever back another Kickstarter project at all -- while 100% of my Pledgemusic pledges have resulted in great albums, only 50% of the Kickstarters I've backed have ever come to anything. Clearly, Kickstarter is aware of people's growing skepticism as they jump on apparent fakes like Anonabox much more quickly these days, but the abusers may have already ruined what could have been a world-changing phenomenon. Rob