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)?'"

Comments

Depends on who you are trying to convince

[LazyNerd]

Here in the corporate world, the term 'open source' works better than 'free software'. The 'free' software (in upper management's mind) means questionable quality and no support, while 'open source' means that there might be some support available. Sure, it sounds crazy, but in big corporations they are used to spending good money for software, and the idea of 'free' is slow to catch on. Still, we have had lots of success getting 'free' and 'open source' products in the door, but we had to move slow and keep it quiet at first.

Re:Depends on who you are trying to convince

[Cyclops]

Well, that may happen over there, but in latin countries we have a word for it: Livre (or Libre, or whatever the slight variation). Software Livre. It works well, and it always boils down to how you present it.

The main problem I see is neither wether you call it "Open Source" or Software Livre. Its neither that they inconsiously accept Microsoft's "Shared Source" as being "Open Source". And its neither wether it has support or not. The community's support together with a knowledgeable and non-lazy worker works far better than the proprietary software, and we're (yet slower than I'd like) starting to understand how things usually do work when we use Software Livre and they usually have problems when you use proprietary software with all the bells and whistles of support

If you have a critical business that needs to be running in the mathmatical limit of 100%, who cares if you have support but your service has a couple of hours of downtime?

Many incompetent managers love the blame game, they love to throw the responsability to the supplier. But ultimately, it was their choice to use that supplier, so I see no solid basis to justify the blame game.

For me, freedom is important. A business needs the 0. freedom to work unfethered by expiring licenses or licenses that restrict what they can do, a business needs 1. to have vendor independence if it wants to have the best support at any given moment, it needs 2. to be able to grow freely, just by copying a worker's computer to the new guy, for instance, and finally, it 3. needs to reduce maintenance costs by cooperating with the community on what regards to software support.

I now present Software Livre this way, and the arguments are much more solid than those of "Open Source".

Oh, and although some have the idea that "open sourcers" would sell their grannies for money, I don't really buy that.

Competition is GOOD!

[Anonymous Coward]

Another dimension? It seems that the FSF is more academically-oriented, while the OSI is more business oriented.

Anyway... competition is good for

• Distros (Redhat vs Suse vs Debian)
• CPUs (Intel vs AMD vs Power vs Alpha(RIP))
• Politics (Republicrats vs Libertarians vs Green)
• Licenses (BSD vs Creative Commons vs GNU)

Competition is just as good for free/open source software.

Remember the previous thread on the new GPL, where people were speculating if when Stallman, Moeglin, Lessig, etc retire from the FSF board - it's concievable a large corporation could take over the new board of the FSF and declare that GPL4 allows their corporation to profit from GPL4'd stuff. Having multiple organizations out there protects us from this problem. So long as the OSI exists, it'd be really hard for a new board to come up with a non-OSI-compatable GPL4.

The distinction is real and important

[Anonymous Coward]

I have corresponded with RMS and I have also
discussed the subject of software licensing
with an intellectual property attorney.

The intellectual property attorney told me
that it is only a matter of time until people
begin to assert the right to royalties for
code contributed to free software projects
that generates any income for anybody.

What Stallman wants is to forestall the
inevitable for as long as possible, and he is
impatient with people who knowingly or
otherwise pave the middleground between free
and commercial under the banner of Open Source,
creating a nice broad avenue for the lawyers
to drive their jags down.

Kevin Bedell will be speaking at SCALE 3x

[irabinovitch]

Kevin Beddell will be speaking at SCALE 3x on February 12th and 13th, 2005. SCALE will be held at the Los Angeles Convention Center in Los Angeles, CA. Kevin's topic this year will be: "The Case for Open Source/Closed Standards" Other speakrs you might want to check out are John "maddog" Hall, Larry McVoy (BitKeeper), and more. Check out the site for more info. PS For a free exhibit hall pass use the promo code "free" or for a large discount on full access pass use the code "newsp".

Re:BSD vs. GNU again

[FuzzyBad-Mofo]

I'm glad we have both the GPL and BSD licenses, but in my opinion GPL is "more free" because it ensures that code contributions remain open source. With either license, a company/individual may use open source code for their own gains. (and there's nothing wrong with that)

However, the GPL simply ensures that any modifications to open source code are themselves available as open source. The BSD license allows propriatary forks of open source code, which may be good from a corporate standpoint, but may be considered detrimental to the open source community at large.

Freedom Software

[Mr.Progressive]

I would suggest 'Freedom Software'. That way you can please both 'free as in libre' proponents and anti-French Bushies.

I just ignore the distinction anyway.

[mcc]

I use the terms "Free" and "Open Source" software pretty much interchangeably and assume anyone who complains about this is apparently so much more wrapped up in semantics than results that their opinion is unlikely to be of much importance.

ESR and RMS might be of the opinion "Free" and "Open Source" mean something substantially different. Guess what? It isn't their decision anymore. The community has grown larger than them.

Re:BSD vs. GNU again

[wayne606]

It's not an issue of somebody making a proprietary fork of emacs and selling it. (Actually I guess this type of thing does happen but rarely).

The interesting case is when a developer at a company would like to include some bit of functionality that's encapsulated in a GPL'ed library. No profit-making company these days will allow GPL'ed libraries to be included in their proprietary software, even though there is a way to do this via the LGPL.

What I would like to see is a modified LGPL that would allow companies to pay the developers of these libraries for the right to include them in proprietary packages. (Or if there are such licenses I wish library developers would use them more often.)

That way everybody wins - the developer gets some royalties, the company gets an unencumbered and safe right to use the package, and all the other users still get the benefits of free software.

The rationale used in the LGPL - that end users will want to relink their closed-source apps with new versions of the open-source libraries - has always seemed strange to me. Nobody in their right mind would do that - if they report bugs in the product and then explain what they have done they will get zero help or sympathy from the support staff...

Freedom Software

[ebresie]

Okay...I think in the end...the amiguity could be resolved by changin "free software" to "freedom software" (tm). Then people avoid the whole "free as in beer" confusion. May not be grammatically correct but I think it's still more reasonable...

Eric Raymond is wrong about Sourceforge

[br00tus]

The linked article has a link to an Eric Raymond article on terminology. However, the model Raymond uses seems flawed to me - very flawed.

Raymond notes that a search on Sourceforge for "open source" versus "free software" is 97%+ versus Despite this, the words free software don't appear on my project's Sourceforge page. After reading this, perhaps I'll put those words up there. Looking around at other projects, I see one on page two of a Google search for "free" on Sourceforge that one project aims to develop free (GPL) speech recognition tools. This project seems to be one saying it is in the Stallman "faction" although since they say "free (GPL)...tools" instead of "free software", Eric Raymond doesn't count them.

More importantly, let's look at the license, are people issuing the "open source" BSD ones or the "free" GPL ones? 40434 projects are GPL while only 4194 projects are BSD. In fact, 6479 projects are LGPL, so even the GPL lesser license beats BSD.

Attitude !

[thoughtlover]

"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)?

It's not a question of attitude at all. Attitude is determined by the past experiences of the individual. From what I've studied in psychology, a person's underlying behavior will only change if the thought patterns change. For thought patterns to change, there has to be an incentive. Change in behavior will ultimately follow if the new thoughts persist long enough.

But the original post mentioned 'moralism' - therefore, it sounds like the author is alleging the question, "Does free/open-source software versus stolen software change people's attitudes toward the usability of free/open-source software?"
Stolen software has to be part of this equation because moralism has nothing to do with free/open-source software. Unless you are illegally bundling/distributing code or binaries.
Without the moralism check, we can assume that a larger percentage of people will steal software because of the one underlying notion that 'something that is free isn't really that good.'
Sayings like 'Nothing is free' and 'Everything has a price' are part of our consumer culture. Case in point, I lost a bid for developing a large corporate website. The reason: I bid 2/3 below the largest bidder! They ultimately won because the board members felt the higher price was going to bring better quality because it cost more. How many people pay for 'quality' when they purchase something based on the label/manufacturer? Are those Nike sneakers really that much better than they were 10 years ago? Is that Mercedes better now that Chrysler bought them? Or that Gucci handbag made in Malaysia?

With time, all empires fall, and some notions, too. Given enough time, some software packages become bloated and less functional (M$ Office) while other become more nimble (Blender.) I believe this is the future for free and open-source software to eventually dominate, however I still don't make much of a distinction between them. From what I see, all software has a license to use it. Almost every consumer product has directions or limitations of use (Take two pills every four hours for pain not exceeding 10 pills in one 24 hour period.)
If I see any distinction between free and open-source, one gives you the binary while the other gives you the source.

For people's attitudes to change about free/open-source software, they have to feel like they are getting that bargain. It's about changing the rooted perspective 'that which is 'free' is not without consequence.'

The root of this problem may be because of the publishers of open-source software. Some projects are more relaxed than others when it comes to their development and maintenance pace. Support may be non-existent, and documentation and interfaces are usually not well thought out. They also don't have megabucks for wide media exposure so their product is not widely known. A person who does discover a free/OS solution may eventually opt to pay for corporate software ultimately because of support. Look at how corporations have bent to take the believability away from free/OS software; dropping prices, reduced versions of flagship products, extended support. Microsoft offering Asia a stripped version of Windows and Photoshop Elements for $99 are two examples of Linux and GIMP winning.

I could understand someone in the mid-90's using Microsoft's free browser versus paying Netscape for theirs. Microsoft hadn't yet established themselves for consistently building poor software. Many are finally discovering that Firefox is a wonderful, free alternative to an addled IE. I seriously doubt the newest open-source adopters make any distinction between free and open-source software.
They weren't part of the process that shaped that software. Given time, they may use it, come to like it enough to become part of the process eventually offering the development team feature suggestions and bug comments. That is the behavior change needed to make open-source software the dominate player in the world.

Re:Never use the GPL

[Todd Knarr]

The GPL has been the subject of legal battles. So far, every company that's been faced with copyright violation charges stemming from including GPL'd code in their products while not complying with the terms of the GPL has, after having their lawyers review the GPL, elected to comply with it's terms rather than risk going to court. Even companies like Cisco who certainly have good lawyers and enough money for that not to be an issue. If it were that easy to rip the GPL to shreds, wouldn't someone have decided they had a good enough chance of winning to take on the copyright holder?

Re:Free?

[ultranova]

The BSD followers would argue that the GPL imposes restrictions, and thus is in fact not free at all.

And the GPL followers would argue that the BSD license doesn't help protect anyone's freedoms, and is thus in fact equivalent to public domain - so why bother with the license at all ?

Just because you happen to agree with those conditions does not mean that everyone else does. Yes, I know the counter argument - "well, if you dont like the conditions you dont have to use it". So I pose this question to you, in that case what is the difference between GPL'ed software and commercial software? The same point can be made just as validly for commercial software - "if you dont like the conditions dont use it".

Simple. GPL doesn't control use, just distribution. Go ahead and use GPL'd program to your heart's content, modify it all you wish, and don't release the source - because you only have to release the source if you wish to distribute that modified version. Of course, you could simply distribute the unmodified version, and keep the modified version private.

Commercial non-free software (as opposed to the many GPL programs being sold for profit - Emacs, for example), on the other hand, forbids any and all redistribution by the end user, forbids modifications to the program, even for private use (and of course it would be difficult to make modifications without the source) and usually tries to impose restrictions on use (whether or not these restrictions are actually legally binding is another matter).

GPL is not "freedom as in speech". Freedom as in speech means people can do whatever they want with what you have said (provided it is within the law).

Your post seems to suggest that there's some fundamental difference between being restricted by law and being restricted by license, with the former restriction somehow not infringing on free speech and the latter infringing. Since both are texts written by lawyers, I fail to see this difference. Please explain ?

The GPL is more like "once you listen to what I say then anything you say on the same subject must now follow rules X, Y and Z" - this is NOT free speech at all

Um, no. That would be patents. The GPL (and all licenses) refers to a particular speech - so it is saying "if you want to quote me on this, go ahead, but you must allow others to quote the resulting speech, too" - how is this not free speech ?

Besides, the analogue with speech is flawed - the GPL only gives conditions to distribution, not use. You cannot use a speech without distributing it, but you can use software without distributing it.