Open Source Community's Double Standard

AlexGr writes to point out a really good point Matt Asay raises in his CNET News Blog: Why do we praise closed source companies who open up a little bit, but damn open source companies who close down a little bit? "Deja vu. Remember 2002? That's when Red Hat decided to split its code into Red Hat Advanced Server (now Red Hat Enterprise Linux) and Fedora. Howls of protest and endless hand-wringing ensued: How dare Red Hat not give everything away for free? Enter 2007. MySQL decides to comply with the GNU General Public License and only give its tested, certified Enterprise code to those who pay for the service underlying that code (gasp!). Immediately cries of protest are raised, How dare MySQL not give everything away for free?"

Comments

Re:What?

[negative3]

Exactly what I thought. Unless I completely misunderstood everything, MySQL is not becoming "closed source", the enterprise version is just not going to be free as in beer any more. You can pay for the enterprise version, and you'll have access to the source code...that's free as in freedom. What is so hard for people to understand about that? From http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html:

Selling Free Software

Many people believe that the spirit of the GNU project is that you should not charge money for distributing copies of software, or that you should charge as little as possible -- just enough to cover the cost.

Actually we encourage people who redistribute free software to charge as much as they wish or can. If this seems surprising to you, please read on.

The word "free" has two legitimate general meanings; it can refer either to freedom or to price. When we speak of "free software", we're talking about freedom, not price. (Think of "free speech", not "free beer".) Specifically, it means that a user is free to run the program, change the program, and redistribute the program with or without changes.

Free programs are sometimes distributed gratis, and sometimes for a substantial price. Often the same program is available in both ways from different places. The program is free regardless of the price, because users have freedom in using it.

Non-free programs are usually sold for a high price, but sometimes a store will give you a copy at no charge. That doesn't make it free software, though. Price or no price, the program is non-free because users don't have freedom.

Since free software is not a matter of price, a low price isn't more free, or closer to free. So if you are redistributing copies of free software, you might as well charge a substantial fee and make some money. Redistributing free software is a good and legitimate activity; if you do it, you might as well make a profit from it.

Free software is a community project, and everyone who depends on it ought to look for ways to contribute to building the community. For a distributor, the way to do this is to give a part of the profit to the Free Software Foundation or some other free software development project. By funding development, you can advance the world of free software.

Re:Human Nature

[Dahamma]

I was really agreeing with you until you said: "Redhat, MySQL, and other companies like them are closing much of their source because..."

Redhat and MySQL are NOT closing their open source. That would in fact be illegal and unethical, because they did greatly benefit from (and in Redhat's case, built the whole product around) open source licensed with the GPL and contributed to by many OSS developers under that license.

But in fact, all they have done is start following the strict letter of the GPL, which is basically "you have to make source available when distributing binaries". Not only do they still follow that, but they still support and make freely available a community version of their project as well.

Based on your post I can't imagine you'd argue with that... I just found it a bit ironic that you propgated misperception that OSS companies are evil for "closing their source" when you seemed to be arguing against that FUD :)