A few days ago, I made reference to a paper released by the Alexis de Tocqueville Institute at the behest of everyone’s favorite innovative software house, Microsoft.
It turns out the paper was released, retracted, revised, and re-released with no mention of the revisions.
Linux and Main – Anthony Awtrey: The Changing AdTI Documents
The Alexis de Tocqueville Institution (AdTI) just released two versions of a white paper entitled ‘Opening the Open Source Debate’. The first was retracted for a time and the second one seemed suspiciously different in my casual reading.
To verify this, I converted each of the PDF files to text files using ‘pdftotext’ (a very handy GPL’d utility) and compared the differences using ‘diff’ (another very handy GPL’d utility). The two articles were substantially different.
The revisions were substantive and cast some light on the inroads Open Source has made in government, how the GPL is misunderstood and misrepresented, as well as demonstrating how weak the paper is, in either version.