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The difference between free software and open source is the focus. While free software (in the RMS definition) means the user has to have certain rights when he receives software (the four freedoms), open source is more a model of development.

OK, that explains a number of really weird outbursts I've seen on mailing lists where someone insists that a project isn't open source, when it's clearly under an open source license. They've internalized this definition.

Given the history of the term, I don't think that RMS is the person to go to for the definition. The OSI definition of Open Source is all about the licensing.

While both can mean the same, open source is also used by companies for proprietary software of which the source code is published. So, you're not allowed to change the code, but it is still open because you can look at it.

No, even Microsoft has given up trying to call that "open source", they now call it "shared source".

In particular, that violates the very first clause in the Open Source Definition.

Who is modding this Anonymous Coward up? It's a blatant troll. The CDDL is an OSI-approved license, and who wants to integrate Java into the Linux kernel anyway?

> Open source refers to being able to read source code and that's all.

Tell that to the Open Source Initiative: The Open Source Definition (Annotated).

Darwin is not very open-source

The Darwin source code is made available under the APSL, which is OSI-approved.

Bruce,

Would you be a proponent of the phrase, "OSI Certified," and discourage the use of the far more ambiguous, and non-trademarked term "open source"?

Clearly, we all have our ideals, and yours are very altruistic; but it seems the former is much more likely to convey a specific message, and cause less confusion amongst outsiders who aren't familiar with the OSI and their aims (eg "The author is providing his source code, yet it isn't 'open source' because it is for non-commercial use only? How is that possible?")

I understand you have moral objections to software not under OSI-approved licenses, and I respect that -- but at the end of the day, I feel it's of the utmost importance to treat each other with respect, regardless of ideals; and this would have the effect of reducing incendiary debates with non-FLOSS authors.

"This software is not open source" can easily be taken the wrong way if said software developer doesn't follow the OSI's interpretation of the term, whereas "This software is not OSI Certified (tm)" is very clear, specific, and completely undebatable.

If so, you have my support and I will sign your petition. I was discouraged to read that the OSI would still push for usage of the term "open source," [1] after having their request to trademark the term rejected. Like others, I feel such a heavy-handed approach is hostile, and causes more damage to the credibility of OSI than it does to help fight this impossible battle [2].

The same also applies to the term "free software," but obviously that one is out of your hands.

Thank you in advance for reading this.

[1] http://www.opensource.org/node/163
[2] http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070622-osi-to-take-more-active-role-in-open-source-definition-enforcement.html

But the fragmentation of licensing agreements (LGPL, GPL, CC, CC2.5, ETC) is just going to confuse people

But the fragmentation of licensing agreements (LGPL, GPL, CC, CC2.5, ETC) is just going to confuse people

Depends on whose definition you follow. While I agree that the words alone mean no more than that, practically when talking about "open source" people mean something akin to the Open Source definition by OSI, which is closer to free software. A license prohibiting commercial use is also not open source according to that kind of a definition for the term.

Instead, use another term when you mean "you can read the source code". I suggest "source available".

From the first link:

"While free software by any other name would give you the same freedom, it makes a big difference which name we use: different words convey different ideas."

And from the second:

"While free software by any other name would give you the same freedom, it makes a big difference which name we use: different words convey different ideas."

That is about calling "Free Software" "Open Source Software" and why they think that is not the right thing to do. It is not about them being different things license wise.

"The Free Software movement and the Open Source movement are like two political camps within the free software community."

"The relationship between the Free Software movement and the Open Source movement is just the opposite of that picture. We disagree on the basic principles, but agree more or less on the practical recommendations."

The FSF will not likely be recommending any software with a license that fits the definition of open source that you gave without fitting the definition of the OSI definition any time soon.

This is the OSI definition of Open Source:

http://www.opensource.org/docs/osd

The is the FSF's definition of Free Software;

http://www.fsf.org/licensing/essays/free-sw.html

Compare if you will. You will see why the FSF can work with the OSI camps in practical ways.

all the best,

drew

Right. Because the OSI has exclusive rights on the phrase "open source". Oh wait, they don't.

I can appreciate what OSI and other such organizations are trying to do but if a project generally complies with the accepted definitions of "open" and "source" then I and most other developers I know are going to call it open source regardless of the requirements of the OSD.

"open source = source code is made available"

http://www.opensource.org/

They may have coinded tghe term, they certainly promoted it and made it polular. They disagree.

all the best,

drew

http://zotzbro.blogspot.com/

http://opensource.org/docs/osd

disclaimer: repost is repost

http://opensource.org/docs/osd

also, repost is repost

http://opensource.org/docs/osd

also, STFU when you clearly have no clue.

The licence only allows non-commercial use, and therefore does not meet the requirements of the Open Source Definition.

Given MS's propensity for muddying (or FUDdying?) the waters as regards open-source/free software (with terminology like "shared source"), a site like /. really shouldn't be doing their work for them...

[T]here's a clear distinction here between people who are developing open source software and engaging in non-commercial distribution on the one hand, and people who are engaging in commercial distribution and use on the other hand. With respect to the former, meaning developers and those engaged in noncommercial distribution, this new covenant not to sue, with respect to patent rights, is applicable.

On the other hand, with respect to companies that are engaged in commercial distribution, or use internally, there is a need to obtain a patent license where there are applicable patent rights, and we're committing to make these patent licenses readily available.

I wrote the section of the OpenCores FAQ that the story refers to so I can give a little background history.

The FAQ answer was the result of an extended discussion on the OpenCores mailing lists about the best license to use. We didn't come up with a definitive answer and the GPL, LGPL, modified BSD recommendation was aimed at reducing license proliferation while giving people a choice between copyleft and non-copyleft. The MIT license was judged to be close enough to the modified BSD license (also noted by OSI) that we could just choose one of them. Reducing proliferation was an issue since people were experimenting with different homebrewed licenses with potential to fragment the community.

Open and Free licensing is still a murky issue for hardware as much of hardware falls outside of copyright. In so far as copyright applies (schematics, bitstreams, source code, ...) it was decided that licenses such as the GPL could be applied. It is still not clear by what legal mechanism a hardware manufacturer can be forced to disclose the "open" portions of a system.

For example say someone builds an integrated circuit using GPLd VHDL from the OpenCores website. The chip might be covered by circuit layout rights but it is questionable whether copyright is applicable. It seems unclear that the GPL can be applied to a chip. A system such as a circuit board is even murkier since it is not covered by circuit layout rights and being a functional system might fall outside copyright (despite manufacturers plastering their boards with the copyright symbol). Any copyright could also be circumvented by rerunning an autorouter with a different seed to generate a different pattern of PCB tracks.

It will be very interesting to see what conclusion Eben Moglen, Mary Lou Jepsen and so on come to now that the OLPC and Pixel Qi have prompted the Free Software community to seriously examine the underpinnings of Free Hardware. A number of years ago Richard Stallman was of the view that Free Hardware was outside the mission of the FSF and freedom for hardware was not relevant since the difficulty of manufacturing was a greater barrier to freedom than the law.

People have different opinions on how things should be. When it's their license and their code, they get to decide. Nonetheless, maybe you should contact the Open Source Initiative. They're an organization which collects licenses and "certifies" them as to their openness. BSD's license is listed as open source.

http://www.opensource.org/licenses/bsd-license.php

I guess you meant CORBA, and no, even if OSS was an entity (perhaps you meant OSI) it is far from abandoned.

The source is being opened, not Open Sourced. Note the use of lower case which to me differentiates from previously closed source being opened to public scrutiny and made available under some licence, and previously closed source being made Open Source under the definition of Open Source.

Oh, first post on /. and it's actually defending Microsoft. As someone stated above, satan _must_ be freezing.

Enough of that and to my point:

I'm quite fond of the GPL and open source licenses in general. But actually, the open source licenses that microsoft has created (Ms-PL and Ms-RL) are a lot less restrictive then the GPL and a great deal easier to read. If Microsoft will use theese licenses then there should be no problem with GPL-compatability as far as I can tell.

The "disclaimer" in that FAQ is just saying that they wont promise anything, and it is probably the smartest thing to do so that they won't get sued.

Oh, first post on /. and it's actually defending Microsoft. As someone stated above, satan _must_ be freezing.

Enough of that and to my point:

I'm quite fond of the GPL and open source licenses in general. But actually, the open source licenses that microsoft has created (Ms-PL and Ms-RL) are a lot less restrictive then the GPL and a great deal easier to read. If Microsoft will use theese licenses then there should be no problem with GPL-compatability as far as I can tell.

The "disclaimer" in that FAQ is just saying that they wont promise anything, and it is probably the smartest thing to do so that they won't get sued.

Companies whose products are or directly relate to free software also tend to be more open than some other companies about the conditions under which they are willing to license rights under trademark law. For example, Open Source Initiative publishes certification mark instructions, and Red Hat publishes the Fedora Trademark Guidelines[1].

[1] Google appears to return a broken link at the moment, but that's beside the point.

You MAY NOT use the Licensed Software to operate in or as a time-sharing, outsourcing, service bureau, application service provider or managed service provider environment.

Right there, your software is not open-source. At least, not Open-Source according to the Open-source Institute, as it violate criteria 6 (no discrimation against field of endeavor) of the The Open Source Definition. Also, the Debian Free Software Guideline have similar provision, which would make your license "non-free" according to Debian.

Whether or not you believe the OSI have a monopoly on the term "Open-Source" is an whole other debate. However, as an Open-Source user and advocate, I frown upon "creative" restrictions in self-proclaimed open-source license, so yours would be a hard sell with me. I wish people would stop cooking their own version of the MPL for every other web applications, and stick with well-known licenses. Sheesh.

I met Stallman late last year. I mentioned that I worked on an OSS project at Sun (OpenSSO) and, almost apologetically, that it was CDDL. He picked up my tone and immediately replied "That's great - that's still free software". So - CDDL, 'open source', according to OSI, 'free', according to RMS.

Well you obviously can't be *sure* I (or someone else) won't run off with it and make millions of dollars, but you can of course release it under a suitable license which would make it illegal for me to do so. I'd suggest something from http://www.opensource.org/licenses or http://creativecommons.org/ if you want.

As for figuring out how it works - well, that just takes time, reading,and thinking; just how much is yet to be determined :D

But the GPL has been "tested" in court, while Paint.NET's current license has, I assume, not been yet. Also there are organizations that will help you in court if it's a GPL violation. So in part it's a matter of practicality, not principle.

Also Paint.NET should consider exactly how they want legitimately derived works to happen. If the GPL prevents certain kinds of derived works that they might like to see others create, then it's not the right license on principle.

Hmm, currently they're using the MIT license, which is extremely permissive. I don't even see a prohibition against re-branding and re-crediting in the license. So it's not obvious to me that the current license is being violated. Perhaps it is and I'm just not seeing it because IANAL. Anyway, consider that the current license provides next to nothing in terms of protection, and that's what the authors chose. The GPL provides substantial protection against abuses, and if paint.net wants to whine, they should "sublicense" (which is explicitly permissible under the MIT license) first to demonstrate that they really don't want this stuff to happen. The MIT license looks to me like a big "kick me" sign.

Did the original license back when actually meet the Open Source Definition? I was of the impression that it didn't, and that no one forked it because of that. Given how popular it was back then, it's hard to believe that people wouldn't have forked it if that had been possible.

... but I am as confident as I am that the Sun will rise tomorrow that it will be safe from terrorists. After all, we have the children to think about.

July 12, 2005

Copyright © 2005 Michael David Crawford.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 2.5 License.

It seems that David Clark, who led the development of the Internet way back in the '70's - did you know there even was a '70's? - wants to create a whole new Internet that will fix many of the problems the current Internet is plagued with. The New Internet's engineers will be much more careful this time around to make sure it works better than the first one did.

I'm afraid, though, that the engineers are not the only ones who will be deciding how our New Internet will work.

If one is able to find any privacy or anonymity in this New Internet, it will be because of some undiscovered security hole, which will be quickly repaired, rather than any kind of conscious design decision. Probably one reason they are accepting proposals before rolling it out is to avoid the sort of accidental security holes that enable pr0n, peer-to-peer filesharing and left-wing political activism.

Microsoft, a leading contributor both to this nation's technology base and to the campaign coffers of its leaders, will embrace this new technology and extend it in such a way that the development and dissemination of Open Source software will be, if not mathematically and physically impossible, at least as intractible as factoring a 2048-bit public key.

Imagine, if you will, Trusted Computing implemented at the router level, in such a way that any packets that go farther than one hop are certified not only to support protocols whose patent licenses are fully paid-up and on file with the legal department in Redmond, but whose content is compliant with the Windows standard. The faintest whisp of a Public License, GNU or otherwise, will result in the dropping not only of the individual packet, not only in the cancellation of the entire file transmission, but, within microseconds, the reporting of the physical location of the offending server to responsible law enforcement personnel. The identities of its rogue administrators will be fetched instantly from the database maintained by the Department of Homeland Security. (You will have to submit fingerprints and DNA samples to obtain a Windows server license, as after all, Internet servers can be used to disseminate explosives r

No, that's like arguing that Open Source licenses may restrict source-code from being distributed in modified form only if the license allows the distribution of "patch files" with the source code for the purpose of modifying the program at build time, and that they must explicitly permit distribution of software built from modified source code.

You could even argue that that's part of the definition of Open Source.

(from TFA) This isn't a big problem in terms of code -- the two files from libarc used are under 1500 lines put together, and one is a heavily-edited copy of inflate.c from zlib, which is public domain.

Eh? The zlib license definitely doesn't read like public domain, more like the modified BSD license.

Sun Java was not open source by the original meaning of the term, which was simply a new more "business acceptable" phrasing for the term free software.

It is true that the gcj/gij "camp" probably didn't call it closed source, but that is because they were part of the GNU family, who preferred the original term (free software) with all its connotations.

Later the term "open source" has been diluted on message boards byt people trying to "reverse engineer" a meaning from the name. But this is no different from "free software", which some people also guess includes any software that doesn't cost any money.

Nitpick: software with such restrictions is not Open Source ("The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor.") or Free Software ("The freedom to run the program, for any purpose (freedom 0)."). You might be able to look at the source code and even modify it under certain restrictions, but it definitely would not be FOSS. Don't refer to it as such because it's factually incorrect and it confuses people unnecessarily.

OpenMoko and the 1973 will fail just as the Greenphone did. There is no leadership behind the project, no vision, just a bunch of well-intentioned geeks who want to make something cool. With no cohesive plan, though, the Neo1973 will never succeed.

1. If OpenMoko doesn't succeed, it will be largely because of posts like the above. Enough negative sentiment will doom any project, however cool.
2. OpenMoko isn't a product, it's a platform. Sure, the Neo1973 isn't the all-time ultimate mobile phone - it's a development platform. That's why in addition to the pre-built phone you get a development board you can house in your own enclosure with your own battery, screen, and other hardware bits. If you don't like Neo1973, build your own phone round the platform.
3. When I first started using Linux in 1993, doomsayers were saying it was obsolete and would never fly. Guess what? They were wrong.

I'm not saying OpenMoko is the world's ultimate phone project. Of course it isn't. But it's a good, big start, and it deserves support. If you don't support it, don't complain if, in ten years time, all you can get are closed, proprietary phones you can't even load your own software on.

You know, I'm getting old. I belong to a generation which, when someone gave us cool hardware, we grabbed and built cool software on top of it. Now, if it isn't all pretty and polished right out of the box, it gets condemned as rubbish. Guess what? Linus Torvalds was just a college kid when he wrote the first kernel. His professors didn't even rate him as very good. Certainly no-one thought he had leadership potential. And as for a cohesive plan, his cohesive plan was to build a scheduler which could schedule two tasks.

Stuff happens. It will surprise you. OpenMoko may, indeed, not be a great success. But if it's a bit of a success, other people will be able to come along and build on it - it is open source. In fact, that's already happening - that's what this story is about. The GreenPhone is not 'dead', it has mutated. Instead of building their own hardware platform, the Trolls are developing the 'green suite' on the OpenMoko platform. So you can still have your greenphone - the only thing is, it will be black and silver, or white and orange.

I far as I can see they doesn't govern use:
http://opensource.org/licenses/ms-rl.html
http://opensource.org/licenses/ms-pl.html

I've heard that some of the other MS licenses prohibited use on other platforms than Windows, but as far as I can see that's not the case with these licenses.

I far as I can see they doesn't govern use:
http://opensource.org/licenses/ms-rl.html
http://opensource.org/licenses/ms-pl.html

I've heard that some of the other MS licenses prohibited use on other platforms than Windows, but as far as I can see that's not the case with these licenses.

IANAL. I don't know why you are disappointed. The GPL contains the same usage terms that the Ms-PL and Ms-RL licenses seem to have. From the GPL:

Each contributor grants you a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free patent license under the contributor's essential patent claims, to make, use, sell, offer for sale, import and otherwise run, modify and propagate the contents of its contributor version.

From the Ms-PL:

Patent Grant- Subject to the terms of this license, including the license conditions and limitations in section 3, each contributor grants you a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free license under its licensed patents to make, have made, use, sell, offer for sale, import, and/or otherwise dispose of its contribution in the software or derivative works of the contribution in the software.

Neither GPL or Ms-PL could offer this grant without being both a usage and distribution license. The Ms-PL/RL licenses don't seem to go beyond this in their terms, so I don't see how you can say it is not Free software.

Open Source is not always FLOSS.

all Open Source means is that the distributor does not hide the source from the outside world.

No part of that says that you are legally allowed to either redistribute, modify or use the software, or do pretty much anything with the source other than just look at it.