In doing a little research today for a potential article I'm mulling over, I ran across this piece by Michael Tiemann on the Open Source Initiative's Web site (click here to see entry). The piece points out that many solutions on the market today, many of those in the CRM arena, that claim to be open-source are not, in fact, and that the term "open source" has become an abused buzzword by corporate marketing departments.

True open-source, he points out, should be defined by the open-source community, not by marketers. In fact, true open-source should be approved by the Open Source Initiative, as the organization was the one to initially define the term.

He indicates that Microsoft has been more honest in their approach by using the term "shared source" for some of its solutions.

It's true that the term is increasingly used without question under the enterprise business trade umbrella, and perhaps we all have to take a little more care that we're not using terms without fully understanding what they mean and recognize that this can harm the real thing.

TES