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Sun's COO Distorts Free In Free Software
sebFlyte writes "Jonathan Schwartz, Sun's COO and president, said at JavaOne that 'the most important initial in free and open source software, to me, if you want to reach the broadest marketplace in the world there's one price that works for everyone, and that's free". As you can imagine, this interpretation of 'free' in terms of software has angered a few people somewhat, including Richard Stallman..." From the article: "The free software movement stands for 'free' as in freedom. The open source campaign doesn't present freedom as an ethical issue, but it still formulates its criteria in terms of what users are permitted to do,"
Lets end all these issues by calling OUR definition of free by a different word. Take their power away.
Suggestions?
Look, you can't just go out and define a word to mean whatever you want. Free means freedom and costless depending on the context, wether you're talking about software not. Getting upset that someone used the word 'free' to mean 'no cost' while talking about software is simply idiotic. Its one thing to educate people, but its an entirely diffrent thing to try to own a word, especialy one thats been around for centuries. Words can have more then one meaning.
Idiots like ESR tried to do this with "hacker", to mean only what they wanted it to mean so that they could call themselves "hackers".
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Wookey, a Debian developer, shared Stallman's view and accused Schwartz of deliberately twisting the definition to justify not releasing Java as open source.
If anything, he probably did it because a large percetange of the population (and especially the business world) don't care to understand "free" in any terms other than money.
Free Software (as RMS believes) is something that is way too radical for most businessmen. I'm sure that Schwartz was just trying to interact with his audience on their level.
Yes, it's wrong and yes it negates all the crazy stuff RMS has talked about over the years but I really don't think it was meant to hide or purposefully deceive anyone. Then again, RMS wouldn't have anything to get his name in the news about then, would he?
How much more did that $2billion buy.
Many open source projects are mimics of commercially available software. They were adopted because they were free for the most part - not because the source code was available. Very few people and companies customize the software or utilize the source code in any way.
Let's call it "libre."
No, wait. That makes us sound pedantic, petty, and grouchy enough that we need to start co-opting other languages' words to set ourselves apart from the crowd.
"Libre" it is.
For more information, click here.
Couldn't we moderate Jonathan Schwartz as a troll?
Now, seriously, the guy must do whatever doesn't break the law to increse Sun's shareholder value. What would you expect, ethical behaviour? Free as in speech is dangerous for Sun - their edge in hardware is eroding fast and he can do nothing about it. He can reduce the erosion in software by creating confusion.
It's not surprising.
Not at all.
http://www.dieblinkenlights.com
Id hazard a guess that for 99% of the people who take advantage of the 'free software' movement do so precisely because its zero purchase cost, not because it gives them freedom of code. Seriously, how many people using apache do so because of the open codebase as opposed to the fact that they got an enterprise level web server for zero cost? MySQL? Perl? Linux? How many people that you recommend a GPLed application to dabble with the code? How many would have paid for that software instead of using something else?
Somehow, I'm thinking Stallman has just found something new to be furious about...! Ingrid, better check your email!
By the way, did the article leave out thefirst name of "Wookey, a Debian developer", did I somehow miss it or is that ZD's idea of a source?
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Somehow I just don't care.
Sun may be shooting themselves in the foot by refusing to join the FOSS movement. Simply offering software for free is obviously not good enough; they need to make it totally accessible for it to meet its potential.
But this doesn't matter, really. If Sun decides that they're going to keep their toys to theirselves, the FOSS community will come up with something to rival it. It happened with lots of other programs, and now we have OpenOffice, Linux, MonoDevelop, Audacity, PDFCreator, GiMP, Blender, Firefox, 7-Zip, and more. It can happen with Java, too.
Regardless of the fact that the new alternatives would no doubt mimic Java, the fact that their source would be universally available would give them an edge over the original.
I am scientifically inaccurate.
How about Freedom...already a clearly understood term and Freedom Software is only three letters longer that Free Software. Or produce a derivative term:
Freeware is already taken and focuses on cost...so maybe Freedomware...or Marxware, Commuware/Commiware, Leftware, Liberalware or Ant-capitalismware...
OR WE COULD STOP BEING DUMB AND TRYING TO OWN THE MEANING OF WORDS!!!!
And guess what, none of those defintions are a quality of free software.
Free software has nothing to do with freedom of software, in any sense, be it speech or beer(btw, last I checked, I paid money for beer). Free Software is about Freedom for the User, not the software.
I was lucky enough to go to JavaOne, and was sitting in the room as he said this, and it indeed annoyed me.
Politics aside, Richard Stallman makes a very clear distinction between Open Source software and Free software. When people refer to FOSS (Free Open Source Software), they have added BOTH "free" AND "open source" to their acronym - this is to make a clear distinction between software that is merely open source, and software that is both free (as in speech) and open source.
Sure, free means "free of charge" as well as "free speech". I wouldn't dare argue that one definition is more valid than another.
But in the context of "FOSS" or "F/OSS" or even "FLOSS" (Free/Libre Open Source Software), the whole reason to add "Free" to the more traditional "OSS" was to convey "Free as in speech."
Why does it matter? I think Sun wants to confuse the community, and make people think that they are on a bandwagon that they *are not on*. I think Jonathan Schwartz knows what the "free" in FOSS means, and intentionally misused it to make people think that he was really buying into FOSS, when in fact, he hasn't, at least with respect to the the JVM and class files. This is the exact reason Apache Harmony was created.
If this doesn't make sense, try downloading the "Free" Sun JDK from anywhere other than java.sun.com. Try getting it to come bundled with a Linux distribution. You can't do these things, because it *isn't* free, they just don't make you pay for it (at least, for now).
The only other point I want to make is that the "free beer" definition buys you something right *now* - the ability to download the Sun JDK without them charging you for it. If you're getting it without paying, what's the big deal? The big deal is that tomorrow, they *could* start charging for it. And then you can only run as long as it takes for you to need some new feature, or support for new hardware or a new OS. Then you pay.
If it were really free, you don't just get it now, but you also get a guarantee that it will always be available free in some form, as long as people need it and are willing to work on it. And really, that is a big difference.
Well, if it's GPLed or BSD, it's not unrestricted.
Neither really empowers anyone besides those looking to modify it, which is a relatively small user base.
The software Google uses for their search engine is Pro-User, but isn't free as in speech.
You're never going to find a term for it that really fits.
I suppose GPLed software could be Hippie Software. Well, except for the fact that most of the hippies use Macs.
500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo
It seems obvious that Sun is very much through the Looking Glass, these days.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Richard Stallman coined the term Free Software. In its context, "free" refers specifically to freedom, not necessarily to price.
The word, in general, can mean several things, from without cost to without fat. However, in the context of Free Software, the official name, as coined by the Free Software Foundataion, it refers to freedom.
If you don't like that definition, then don't call your stuff Free Software. However, don't try arguing that it has some other meaning for the stuff that is called that, because that's incorrect.
And when the COO of Sun says that the most important thing about Free Software is that people can get it at no cost, well, Stallman has a right to be a little miffed, because (from his perspective, and many others' I'm sure) the real importance of Free Software is that it's free as in freedom.
I've come for the woman, and your head.
All Free Software is Open Source, but not all Open Source is Free Software.
To further cloud the issue there is Copyleft which is a specific type of Free Software which is intended to give rights to the user and contributers and protect them. (GPL is the only Copyleft I know about, but I'm sure there are others).
BSD and MIT licenses are not Copyleft, but they are Free Software and by extension Open Source Licenses. APSL, CDDL, Aladdin, etc are Open Source licenses, but not Free Software licenses.
Maybe we should just make everything we want to give away for free as Public Domain and not fret about all these complexities anymore.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
The GPL is NOT free. It puts huge restrictions on the distribution of the code that are mostly incompatible with anyone, god forbid, trying to make a living off non-enterprise software.
If you put something in the public domain and let it go with no strings attached, that's free software. That's not what the GPL is, saying anything else is misleading.
None of the replacements for "free software" you mention work well, and this is usually cleared up in every FSF talk at the top of the Q&A session. Liberated/unenslaved/freed software doesn't work for software that was always free from the start (like GNU Emacs). Entities can't be liberated if they were always free. This same problem plagues all but one of your other suggestions. Liberty software might have worked, but by now you're about 20 years too late. The term "free software" is already listed in the most widely-used free software license, the GNU GPL. Changing terms now would not clearly help.
But you also have the problem of specifying how software is free -- what freedoms do you get, exactly? Instead, I recommend taking the time to explain what software freedom means. This will require people to stop believing that the right combination of two words will accurately convey ideas of arbitrary complexity.
You're not alone in your thoughts on this issue, in fact the people who founded the Open Source Initiative (and thus started the open source movement) thought as you do and coined the term "open source", in part, to do this job.
As RMS points out, they too failed:
Digital Citizen
Who is "defin[ing] a word to mean whatever you want" or "[g]etting upset that someone used the word 'free' to mean 'no cost'"?
I can point to where the FSF patiently acknowledges the ambiguity and patiently explains why they are focusing on the freedom meaning (including explaining which specific freedoms you get). I've heard speeches where Eben Moglen, counsel for the FSF, uses the word to mean zero cost and freedom in the same speech.
As for "hacker", the term did not originally mean what the popular press means when they use the term. In fact, there was a book called "Hackers", which includes some information about RMS, which referred to the old usage of that term.
Digital Citizen
I'm sorry... but he's right. Do you think that most of the people are adopting open source software because it's better? No, they're doing it because it saves cost in the majority of cases. Look at that story submitted just a few below this one. If software came out that was very restrictive but cheaper with a lower tco and a complete win-win-out-of-the-box-market-penetrating-razzle-d azzle whatever people would jump on it. For people that build ON free software, freedom matters more, for people that build WITH free software, price matters more. In the corporate world, most people build WITH free software. This is the market that Sun's COO is addressing.
Just have a look at this article that says:
This is just another story people are using to bash Sun. Just like the whole JDS thing. Sun made a lot of moves to try and push a linux desktop. They went a little bit with it even though everyone was bashing them for it. Then they woke up and realized... The corporate world isn't ready for linux on the desktop yet. Boo em when they're trying to push linux on the desktop and then Boo em when they stop.Open Source Java DAO Generator
Much of what ESR says includes namecalling and an ahistorical view of how the free software community developed. In his most recent interview (covered elsewhere on /.), he begins by dismissing the need for the GNU GPL without acknowledging that the license was in widespread use well before his movement began, that this license was not written to benefit businesses (unlike his open source movement), and that persistant framing of the GPL as being "open" code tries to link his movement to the intention of the GPL (despite the fact that the GPL was written by the FSF many years before ESR's movement began, thereby clearly showing that the GPL was defending software freedom without ESR or the open source movement).
He is not alone in framing issues in this deceptive way. Mark Webbink's essay on "open source" licensing (which fails to use the concept of copyleft because that is tied to the free software movement and the open source movement struggles to get away from any discussion of software freedom), and other notable open source proponents speak or write similarly.
Digital Citizen
Where, exactly, can I hear Stallman "shrieking that the word [pirate] only has a single proper meaning"? Certainly not in the list of words you might want to avoid. Without any references to primary sources, your post is highly overmoderated and is properly identified as namecalling, thus making the post either flamebait or a troll worthy of a lower score.
Digital Citizen