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OSI Approves Three New Licenses
Russ Nelson writes: "In our monthly board meeting this past Wednesday, the Open Source Initiative approved three new licenses for use with OSI Certified Open Source Software: the W3C
license, the Motosoto license,
and the Open
Group Test Suite License. In other action, one license was voted down because it violated the discrimination clause of the Open Source
Definition. Another (the RTSP) was
withdrawn because the license-discuss mailing list convinced the
submittor that it wasn't ready. And one (the DSPL) goes back to
license-discuss because we disagree with their analysis and want to
re-negotiate it with them. Several people have suggested that we post the licenses that we have turned down, and explain just why they don't comply with the Open Source Definition. We don't want to discourage people from submitting licenses, knowing that their license might be held up for public notice. We'd rather encourage people with non-compliant licenses to fix them so they are compliant."
"freeware" is a blanket term that usually refers to any program in binary form or source code that is given away. In other words the "free" in "freeware" means free-as-in-beer, or stuff you don't pay for. For that reason it is extremely general and nonspecific. Both "Open Source" and "Free Software" are much more specific than "freeware". These days, the word freeware has come mostly to refer to software that is available for free in executable binary format only and is closed source.