On: The computer programming language known as "open source code"

[russellallen]

I love it when outsiders to a community (like journalists) get things like this wrong, because it makes me rethink my mental categories.

We have absorbed a culturally agreed set of differences between a computer language, a platform, a framework, a library, an OS... and we're comfortable with licencing being coextensive with these units without getting confused, for example.

[asnyder → russellallen]

I'm not so sure about the library vs framework agreement. Many packages that would historically be labeled libaries, now call themselves a framework, making it even harder for the real frameworks to stand out among the clutter.

[bodhi → asnyder]

Isn't the difference generally that a library is used by client code, whereas client code sits 'inside' (for varying levels of inside) a framework? That's my rule-of-thumb anyway.

[jedbrown → bodhi]

There's certainly a continuum, almost any decent library can be extended by user code.

[waterside81 → bodhi]

That's how I used to remember things. You call a library, a framework calls you (is how I kept things straight when I started out in CS)