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The Semantics of Free Software vs. Open Source
An anonymous reader writes "As the end-of-year technology round-ups begin, LinuxWorld's Kevin Bedell notes that in his opinion no useful distinction is served any longer by preserving the two separate terms 'open source software' and 'free software'. One interesting sidelight: Bedell says that 'one of the leaders of the open source movement' wrote to him in an exchange they had on this topic: 'The distinction between 'open source' and 'free software' is not technical; it's the same code and licenses. Nor is it social; it's the same developers. It's strictly one of attitude - are we focused on moralism and changing peoples' thoughts (free software) or on results and changing peoples' behavior (open source)?'"
I've seen open source software that wasn't free. There definitely needs to be a distinction.
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For many people "free" suggests poor quality as in "you get what you pay for". If you tell your boss that you want everyone to start migrating from Microsoft products to "free software", chances are they won't be too excited about the prospect. You tell them that you want to migrate to "open source software" and they'll at least give that a listen.
open source doesn't necesarily mean free, and free is not necessarily open source...
however, most people don't really care if it's open source or not, free is fine. i like open source software, but don't mess with or even download the source code... it's nice that someone else does the work. someday i may learn a programing (non-web programing) language and help out, but until then, let someone else mess with the source code. as long the free is adware/spyway/malware free.
Evolution is a state-sponsored, state-protected religion.
you wouldn't have this problem is Stallman had chosen a verb rather than a noun, such as "free programming."
Open Source is "here's the source, you can see what it does, feel free to use the source to make something else."
Free Software is "everyone has the right to see what their computer's doing, and do whatever they want with the software on their computer."
(The headaches start because GPL'd "Free Software" is rather antagonistic to those that want to make a living selling software. It's hard to profit when anyone can copy your product and sell it for half price.)
"industry"? try "bazaar", or more accurately, "bazaar with no buyers".
I'm not trolling here -- in my eyes, there just isn't really much of an industry around free software. Those lucky few who have made a couple bucks tend to have had to do it in a service industry, like technical support or software piracy.
Cretin - a powerful and flexible CD reencoder
Now, back to the topic at hand...
Open Source packages that are sold (such as Enterprise versions of Linux a la SUSE or Xandros) prove that Open Source does not always mean freebies, though many have come to equate it with such a term.
This is particularly interesting because of the mindset. When I think of Open Source, I think of useful software that's free, but without detriments to my system (firefox or Open Office).
But when I think of free software, the first thing that pops into my mind is this spyware-supported trash that finds its way on to many unsuspecting user's pc's...something like Gator's auto complete software or Kazaa's file sharing p2p, and definately screensavers.
This has sadly corrupted my idea about what free software is.
Mercy was given to me by Christ...I must give the same to others.
No, there is more to it than that. The source being open doesn't mean you can modify it, and the software being free doesn't mean you can do whatever you want with it.
There is a distinction between free as in cost, and as in freedom.
The difference is in the motivations:
Free Software is motivated by the moral need to create a Free Way to use computers -- to free software users from their "masters".
Open Source software is motivated by the practical advantages of the Open Source development process.
The Free Software movement is more idealist: "Don't use it if its not free, whether or not there are practical advantages".
The Open Source movement is more pragmatic, even at the cost of some Freedom: "Use whatever is better technically for your purpose, even if its not free".
I'm sorry, but I think it's utterly ridiculous. The two are not mutually inclusive and cannot be used interchangably.
Although all open source software is free by its very nature, it's ridiculous to try to make the reverse analogy that free software is also by default open source. There are a number of quality programs out there for which the source code is not freely available but the program itself is free of cost and in many cases limitations.
Web sites have been posted and we are all aware of many of them. I have not seen the source code to AdAware being made available, but I know that it is not only a high-quality piece of software, but it is also free from cost, whether hidden (adware) or explicit. We can all name multiple other products that are the same way.
If anyone confuses "free" with "cheap", they are only preventing themselves from experiencing some great products as long as they are aware of which "free" products really are free and which ones have hidden "costs", aka Kazaa.
It can also be argued that early Shareware programs, like Doom and the various Apogee games were free but not open source (at least back then). We could play the first chapter of those games as often as we wanted. They were indeed free but they at the time were most certainly not open source.
So, there is a strong distinction between "open source" and "free software". Just because one includes the other doesn't mean that it has to be the same in the other direction. To consider the two phrases to be synonymous is a ridiculous notion.
The Overrated mod is for reversing inappropriate, positive mods, not for voicing disagreement with a post.
But inherently flawed. Open Source software is usually Free, too, but sometimes it isn't. I can see how the two labels could be confusing (but not as confusing as free as in beer and free as in speech), but as long a free software is closed source or open source software is even occassionally not free, the distinction is still important.
All generalizations are bad.
While the author of this post means "free" as in freedom, liberty/libre, emancipation, etc. the general public will think free as in beer, gratis, no licensing fees.
At least in English-speaking countries.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
If the OSI gets too much backing from greedy corporations, it could be influenced by their needs and start encouraging licenses designed more to divide-and-conquor the open source community than to work with it.(cough, Sun's OSI-approved license, cough)
So long as the FSF exists, it'd be hard for the OSI to sell out completely.
Similarly, if Stallman & buddies happily retire sometime in their old age and Microsoft plants became the next FSF board and try to say GPL-4 alllows GPL'd code to be used to make money only for MSFT - it's nice that the OSI will provide a valuable check&ballance for that possibility.
I could be wrong, but IMO, they aren't the same licenses. The GPL and BSD licenses differ quite a bit.
Both the BSD licenses and the GPL are free and open source licenses. That even includes the old BSD license with the advertising clause that was incompatible with the GPL.
But your thought is a good one (and correct) even if your example is flawed. A better example would be Apple's AAPL, which is an open source license that is neither free nor compatible with the GPL.
See http://www.fsf.org/licenses/license-list.htmlfor an excellent overview of licenses and how they affect your freedom and/or protect you as the author.
Many Open Source licenses are not free (by either the FSF/GNU definition or the BSD Folks' definition), and clearly a distinction is both necessary and important. Anyone claiming otherwise quite obviously has an ulterior motive and agenda which they feel is furthered by obfuscating what is implied by a Free License and what is implied by an Open Source License, and that agenda certainly appears to be at odds with the free software community and a large part of the open source community.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
The "free" in "free software" means "libre", not "gratis". This has been pointed out many times already, yet some people still don't seem to understand the big difference.
All free software is open source (because its source code is available), but not all open source software is free.
It was a really good paper.
With a license like BSD if your product hits the big time, your competitor can grab it, change some things to break compatability, and force you out of the market, while keeping their customers and yours from ever making the changes they need to their systems.
With a license like the GPL, you can never be forced out of the market by your competitor stealing your product and breaking compatibility. Conversely, both your customers benefit from any improvements either of you make, and you can still make lots of money on support, installation, customization, etc.
So, for both average users and businesses, the term 'open source' is superior. One gets sick of explaining the difference between 'free' and 'libre'. The distinction is just an extra hurdle for OSS/FS to surmount.
-- Bob
1^2=1; (-1)^2=1; 1^2=(-1)^2; 1=-1; 1=0.
That's a good part of the theory behind the creation of the open source movement. However, the businesses I've talked to are very interested in making private derivatives of free software--taking advantage of a freedom which the open source movement doesn't care about (in fact this was one of the FSF's initial objections to the early versions of the Apple Public Source License; one had to notify one central authority which, as they say, happened to be Apple, in a lot of situations one would commonly encounter, hence the license initially did not respect user's privacy). The same revision of the APSL which the FSF did not call a free software license qualified as an open source license.
But as this highly underrated essay points out, the open source movement provides business with a stamp of approval.
The FSF has no problems with the practical goals of the open source movement, except that those goals don't go far enough. Faster, cheaper development of less buggy programs is nice but says nothing about one's freedom to run, inspect, share, and modify software at any time for any reason.
Digital Citizen
That would not work for some programs like GNU Emacs and many of the other GNU programs. They were never non-free programs (like Blender which was proprietary then freed). And there is little point in distinguishing between programs that were initially free software versus those that became free software later in their development.
Digital Citizen
Of course that's what the freakin' attorney told you ... it's his/her job to convince you that you can retroactively get royalties out of the things you gave away. He/she gets your money if you lose; he/she get's the other guys money if you win. Regardless it makes work.
The biggest problem with the GPL is the example included in it. "Ty Coon president of vice" invites the reader to consider the GPL as little more than a joke.
Also, most IP attorneys are not in the business of actually *enforcing* the contracts they write. Most spend their time *writing* up cookie-cutter contracts to try and protect clients. Very few actually know first hand what it's like to step before the bench in a significant case.
Can we PLEASE call it something other than 'free' -- perhaps something that doesn't have an alternate meaning?
I've seen this whole "free as in freedom" explained so many times it makes me sick. A good name for the movement would imply this, and not require folks to explain it over and over, while leaving others walking away with the wrong impression ('how do you make money off FREE software?').
Why don't we call it 'communal software' or something, and put a stop to the endless re-hashing of these "GPL For Dummies" rants.
Wait, so are you telling me that you - presumably a serf like myself - *want* to cater to the greed of executives and managers?
You're welcome to believe whatever you want, but it seems like you have bought into a system of ideology which perpetuates the notion that they deserve - have a right to - their social, economic, and political control of our lives.
The current order is the creation of men; it is not holy, sacred, or Truth. These men were no wiser or more priveleged to truth than ourselves. They are dead and buried. If we choose now to remain captive to their whims and fancies, we are fools.
"That's the kind of infantile attitude that *makes* you a serf."
I see. Rather than assuming what is ours by overthrowing the current order of things, we should play in submission to its distorted ethics and oppressive laws?
And by just playing along we will liberate ourselves?
Grand!
No, it is precisely by *rejecting* your propaganda that we will liberate ourselves.
The entire article, and no doubt the Slashdot discussion, is riddled with a failure to observe the use/mention distinction.
EXAMPLE
"Boston" has two "o"'s.
Boston does not have two "o"'s.
To add to the confusion, the author inconsistently employs scare quotes, which are double quotation marks used around a phrase, not to mention the phrase, but to cast doubt upon the legitimacy of the concept that the phrase expresses, or for other conversational reasons.
People who are not careful enough to understand or correctly employ the use/mention distinction should usually refrain from serious semantic discussion.
"Thank you"
Beyond the "no money" implication, there's the issue that "free software" implies that the software is free, rather than that the user is free. I don't know about you, but I want the software I use to behave exactly as I tell it, and not demand vacations, the right to work for someone else, a fair wage, and so forth ("Free speech" is an idiom, which is why there's no alternative to "speech" in "free as in speech"). In fact, my experience with open source software is that it is more firmly under my control than closed source. I've seen a translation in which the translator took "Logiciel libre" to mean public domain software, lacking any other idea as to how "logiciel" could be "libre".
The term "free software", taken literally with the intended meaning of "free", means "liberated software", when "liberating software" is what people really mean. In fact, I think that upper management might like to use "liberating software", since they seem to feel trapped by their proprietary software.
I'm a Free Software guy, because after all has been said and done, the GNU philosophy provides a much more rational answer to the question of "Why use it?" than the Open Source Initiative.
.NET framework, the continued, and apparently unbreakable, dominance of Adobe and Quark in graphic design. Packages like AutoCad, Maya, Cubase, Reason, Live and Final Cut Pro are not just best-of-class, they practically define the industry. And then there's everybody's favorite, games: in the 6 years since the founding of the OSI, the games industry has grown by more than 100%, all without giving open source so much as a second thought.
The Open Source Initiative answers that question by saying that Open Source software is better: the programs are better, the development model is better, the support is better. In some cases that's at least subjectively true. Apache really is a best-of-class webserver. gcc really is a very good compiler collection.
But then the examples quickly dry up. Mozilla, supposed to be the posterchild of the OSI movement, was years late, and had to be forked to spawn Firefox to finally deliver something people will actually use. It's a bit better in some respects than Internet Explorer, but not by a large margin. What's more it has been plagued by the exact same problems that open source development was supposed to prevent: it's late, security issues have been kept under wraps (you'll need to copy-paste this link into a new browser window), and it's bloated.
That's not to say that it's bad software. In fact, I think it's pretty good software. But after years of development, broad community support, and generous funding by AOL, the end result turns out to be just slightly better than the most important closed source competitor. It's hardly a compelling argument in favor of the supposed superiority of Open Source.
It's easy to go on in this vein, and mention the whole or partial failures of Open Office, or Helixcode, or XFree86, but that would be merely antagonizing and besides, it doesn't prove anything. In order to debunk the claim that Open Source leads to better software, it's not sufficient to mention open source failures: it's necessary to show closed source success as well.
Well, that's not hard either. There's Apple's spectacular introduction of MacOS X, Microsoft's splendid
Considering all this, it's hard to maintain that Open Source implies better software. And if it doesn't imply that, then why use it, or produce it? After all, isn't the Open Source creed all about doing what works best?
Most Open Source advocates aren't quite ready to admit this to themselves yet. They claim Open Source produces more secure software, and use Windows' extremely poor record in this regard to prove it -- but they ignore the rising number of GNU/Linux exploits and the exemplary security record of closed source MacOS and HP/UX. They claim MS Office is bloated, but ignore the lumbering blimp that is Open Office. The list goes on and on, but I'm quite sure that at this point the few people who are still reading will wonder whether this post goes on forever.
When all is said and done, what remains is the love of programming, the joy of seeing your work being put to good use, and the desire to share it with like-minded souls. Being "better" is important; what's more important is how we can protect our rights to share amidst a climate of overbearing patents and corporate favoritism.
This is what the GPL tries to guarantee, and why Free Software is so different from Open Source.
We will undoubtedly come across someone who disagrees or finds it uncomfortable to hear freedom talk or talk of equality between men's and women's social circumstances. But we should continue to insist upon what we want. I want software freedom, including the right to make private undistributed derivatives, so I'm sure to ask for free software by name. Open source would not give me the same rights.
Social progress depends on persistent demands. As Frederick Douglass wrote:
I find the use of the term "extremist" in your post odd--as if the demand becomes unreasonable if someone can get others to call the demand "extremist"; we need not bother examining what the demand is for if someone we trust calls it "extremist". It is reasonable, fair, and just to demand equal pay for equal work (still denied to women in the US) or desegregated schools (still denied to many non-whites via bussing). Those who want software freedom should also insist on software freedom without backing down to mere "open source".
Digital Citizen
No, we don't need the word "free". "Open" does just fine.
The Statue of Open with her raised arm lighting the world for openness given to America (land of the open) by France to celebrate Life, Openness, and Equality is surely evidence of that.
I'll go raise my flag now, in honor of the brave who died so I can be open.
/sarcasm
I agree with most of your points. RMS's ideas are at times brilliant, while his presentation of those ideas suck. He is a Hacker/Philosopher, and people of either professions are far from being known as 'socially experienced' creatures. A better presentation of those core ideas is more than welcome.
However, it comes to the point where you need to ask the question - "At what point have we strayed from our original purpose?" Open Source was founded to combat the problems in the presentation of the philosophies, which is good. The word "Free" is ambiguous. Different people value different freedoms, I sure wouldn't present the freedom to create a community to the CEO of a company but would present the freedom to use without restrictions, for example. However, people have gotten a little carried away with Open Source and it no longer represents the "why" but instead the "how".
Presenting the development model as more stable is a very good idea. However, when it's presented as the _only_ reason then things have gotten completely out of hand. What about the freedom to study the source code, providing the community and businesses with better experienced administrators? What about the freedom to take an existing program or set of programs and modify them to create a solution custom tailored for my business or organization? Why do I hear of the development model instead of the freedom of choices it gives you, such as the ability to choose from multiple sources of tech support and other services instead of being chained to one company? To a businessman, is the freedom to have my data not locked into a particular vendor unimportant?
The presentation of Free Software is far from perfect. Obviously. However, usage of Open Source to spread the philosophies of Free Software is even less perfect. The development model is the "how". To present the development model as the "why" is akin to tossing your gun over the cliff and taking on an army with your knife - you simply ignore your greatest reasons to get people to switch in lieu of a few points that sound snappy but have no real true depth.
There is a middle ground. Re-read this post and think "Free Software and Business". All people value their freedom. It's just that different people value different freedoms. There is a better way than what we're doing today. We all just need to get off our butts as a community and provide a better implementation and presentation of the old ways, so to speak.
Both of these are actually incorrect. GPLed software can be distributed for a price--even an absurdly high price (look at what the FSF used to charge for tapes of emacs...), but any distribution must include full source code and the ability to modify and redistribute the same.
BSDLed code may be used for anything--you can take it, change it and sell it and not include the source.
Thus the GPL protects the freedom of users (who can always modify and redistribute the code), whilst the BSDL protects the freedom of the code itself (it imposts almost no restrictions on the code or its use). I prefer the GPL, since as an author I don't want someone else to take my code proprietary.