Victory is sweet
<p>Ever since the open-source rebranding in 1998, I&#8217;ve been telling people that &#8220;open source&#8221; should <em>not</em> be capitalized because it&#8217;s an engineering term of art, and that we would have achieved victory when the superiority of (uncapitalized) open source seeped into popular culture as a taken-for-granted background assumption.</p>
<p>There&#8217;s a thriller writer named Brad Thor who I never heard of until he publicly offered to buy George Zimmerman any weapon he likes as a replacement for the pistol the police impounded after the Trayvon Marin shooting.  What Thor was really protesting, it seems, was the fact that Zimmerman didn&#8217;t get his pistol back when he was acquitted; instead, the federal Justice Department has impounded it while they look into trumping up civil-rights charges against Zimmerman.</p>
<p>This made me curious. The books are pretty routine airport-novel stuff, full of exotic locations and skulduggery and firefights.  Like a lot of the genre, they have a substantial component of equipment porn &#8211; lovingly detailed descriptions of weapons and espionage devices.</p>
<p>Amidst all this equipment porn the characters casually use &#8220;open source&#8221; (specifically of encryption software) as a way of conveying that it&#8217;s the best available.  And the author writes as though he expects his readers to understand this.</p>
<p>Victory is sweet.</p>
