Discussion Groups / English Usage / November 2006

Hie thee to a library and consult (in the Reference
Dept.) a "thesaurus."  Library staff will help you if
you ask.   Unlike a dictionary, a thesaurus is grouped
by idea (not alphabetically), thus presents on the same
page all synonyms and many words of near but
non-identical meaning.  In the home and the office, the
Penguin edition of Roget's Thesaurus meets most needs.

What inferior substitute have you identified?

Without the rest of the context, I can't be sure of this, but I think
the simplest useful alteration is to replace "is amenable to change"
with "can be changed".  YOu don't need to come up with a substitute
for "amenable."

I feel the same way.

Do you mean that the software is technically capable of being modified by
the recipient?  Or that the software is licensed in such a way that
modification is legally as well as technically possible?  It's unclear
what you mean by "amenable" and "change".

Note that if you define "open source software" in such a way, you
are going well beyond the definition of "open source software" used by the
Open Source Initiative and the definition of "free software" used by the
Free Software Foundation (that is to say, you'd be including software made
available under certain kinds of arrangements that wouldn't be considered
'open source' or 'free').  On the other hand, "publicly available" might
involve a much narrower set of such software (I don't think any license
associated with open source or free software requires, in general,
publication to the entire world, and such a requirement would, I think,
run afoul of the definitions used by the OSI and the FSF).  It's unlikely
that you could come up with a useful definition of "open source" that
makes no reference to licensing conditions.

Depending on what your purpose is, you might
find the definitions of "open source" used in the statements collected at
http://www.patentcommons.org/ to be useful.  For example, one of the
patent pledges collected there says:

Open Source Software is any computer software program whose source code
is published and available for inspection and use by anyone, and is made
available under a license agreement that permits recipients to copy,
modify and distribute the program's source code without payment of fees
or royalties. All licenses certified by opensource.org and listed on
their website as of August 1, 2005 are Open Source Software licenses for
the purpose of this pledge.

Finally, "publicly" is a spelling not specific to American English. It is
the only acceptable spelling in contempoary English anywhere.

Subject to change.