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FSFE President Urges Community To Strengthen Open Source As a Brand
Georg Greve, founder and president of the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE), has an insightful look at FOSS from a brand perspective with urgings that the community come together and strengthen open source as a unified brand. "There are plenty of false enemies to go around. Ironically, the most common form of false enemy is found around the animosity that has built around branding and framing issues, more specifically in the area of 'Free Software' vs 'Open Source.' Name-calling and quarreling on either side is not helpful, and serves to hide the common base and interest in having a strong brand and powerful message. The historical facts around Free Software are well documented and available to anyone who wishes to look them up. But instead of focusing on past insults and wrongs, I believe our focus should be on the future. We should realize that what divides us pales in comparison to what we have in common and that division and exclusion are harmful to us all. So we should rein in the name-callers on either side, and empower those people who know how to build cooperation, corporations, and positive feedback loops."
Although he insists that there's no difference between "Free Software" and "Open Software", he needs to realize that he won't get far in truly creating a "brand", which he also refers to as "anyone's gut feeling", using a word that the majority of those "anyone"s out there have a "gut feeling" means something other than what he intends it to mean.
To anyone who is not part of the F/OSS movement, "free software" means software that doesn't cost anything, and it always will. Don't try to change people's perception of words to match what your product is, change the words you use to steer people's perception of the product. If it's freedom you want to communicate, then do it with the word "freedom", or the word "open", or something similar, but not "free", which, when placed in front of a product (such as "software"), always implies "zero dollars" to the rest of the world.
"You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war." -- Albert Einstein
unless you belong to an open source organization, it doesn't seem at all clear
that open source as a concept needs to maintain 'branding' at all.
But instead of focussing on past insults and wrongs, I believe our focus should be on the future. We should realize that what divides us pales in comparison to what we have in common and that division and exclusion are harmful to us all.
I guess I agree with him in this. There are people on all sides of these issues that are far too concerned about being right and preaching their "Right Way". Name calling and other childish behaviour is counter-productive. What is needed is good debate on the issues and without ad hominem attacks that only detract and distract.
That being said my feeling is that those that idolizes various ways of distributing, publishing or retail of software is becoming increasingly marginalized; which is a good thing. Dogmatic subscription to an ideology is always a powerful activator for the Us Vs Them instinct that seems to run through so much of our public debates and arguments.
The Long Now Foundation
Then let's hope the Open Source Initiative's days of calling free software activism "ideological tub-thumping" are behind them. I don't see branding as a means of teaching people about software freedom (the very thing the OSI doesn't talk about in their belief that businesses don't want to hear about user's freedoms), but I'm happy to learn about branding efforts that explicitly teach people about supporting software freedom for its own sake and defending it for future generations so as to build and maintain social solidarity. My experience is that efforts aimed at branding something typically aim for narrow commercial interests: convenience, ease-of-use, and reliability. These things are not bad but they are insufficient for teaching people to value the freedoms to run, share, and modify computer software; those values were chosen to meet the needs of proprietors—the people and organizations that don't respect software freedom.
When it comes to teaching freedom, I don't have the trouble some say they have. I used to host a call-in radio show talking about free software and related issues. I didn't have problems explaining the philosophical difference between free software and open source nor did I have objections to playing various talks by people who went into the implications of this philosophical difference. More recently, I find that the essay "Why Open Source Misses the Point of Free Software" to be an excellent and not at all insulting essay on the philosophical differences between free software and open source. One of the essay's points that comes up repeatedly is how people who identify with each movement react in the face of powerful proprietary software. Open source advocates would go along with the proprietor, free software activists would reject the proprietor and work on something that would do the same job but respect user's software freedoms:
I have to wonder what message any brand sends before I can agree to go along with it. The FSFE essay doesn't make that clear, despite the call to action in the third paragraph from the end.
Digital Citizen
Who started the bickering over the FS vs OSS terms? None other than Richard Stallman himself. It's his brands he wants promoted at the expense of other brands. There is no Linux, it is instead GNU/Linux. It's not Open Source it's Free Software. He has started both those controversies and continues to fan their flames.
So be careful with your heresies, or the FSF may excommunicate the FSFE.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
Well, Linux is a brand (only the fatally jealous calls is GNU/Linux :) )
That's enough to make it a 'known entity' amongst some, if it wasn't branded as such, each distro called themselves something completely unique, then they wouldn't have anywhere near the same amount of effort and support behind them. The fact that each distro can call themselves a Linux distro makes it completely different.
I don't think we need a single thing to market when having many flavours is quite sufficent.
Indeed.
There are people in the commercial realm who will claim that the differences between Open Source and Commercial are insignificant, and that the current state of the code should be the sole quality by which they are judged. And the Open Source people will foam at the mouth over it, because the differences are very significant.
Then those same people will turn around and claim that the differences between Free Software and Open Source are insignificant.
Compromises that grant others leverage over you are never insignificant.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
Ok, I'll bite.
The OSI and FSF license criteria are more or less identical. Or at least they were the last time I tried to compare them.
Aside from the actual code, the licenses would form the substance of the movement, no?
Why stop? For someone associated with the FSF to finally speak the truth on this matter is delightfully refreshing. There is no substantive difference between Free Software and Open Source Software. Yeah, you might be able to find some inconsequential differences that do not apply to any actual software, but that only proves the point of it not being substantive.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
Open source is a random barbarian horde of software developers.
Form wikipedia:
A brand is a collection of experiences and associations connected with a service, a person or any other entity.
As barbarians had its brand (loot, pillage and scoff off), so does F/OSS. It is associated with security, no-virus, gratis, hard-to-administer, BSA safe and whatnot.
In eyes of non-believers we are one, we are legion.
This guy makes some excellent points that will no doubt fall upon many deaf ears.
And to be honest its safe to ignore people like this if you are a hobbyist and don't care whether you will continue to have hardware support for your hobby machine. After all, you can just have some fun reverse engineering the drivers you need.
The only reason to care about branding for open source and free software is if you actually expect businesses to embrace it and invest resources in developing things that work with it. You know, to enable doing the kinds of things people have come to expect to be able to do with a desktop computer.
I remember a time when it was a fair challenge to get much more than vga out of xfree86 due to lack of drivers, and when many modems and ethernet cards simply didn't work in Linux. Printers same thing. Forget about a scanner or digital camera. It was a pain in the butt for anyone with aspirations to actually have a desktop useful for much more than tinkering with itself. This has always been a limitation of open source. Things have gotten much better. And for things to continue to get better, the community should put some effort into thinking about others' perceptions of open source and trying to improve them. This is how people (including executives with very little technical interest or knowledge) make decisions end up impacting our community.
Mindshare gains are to not accomplished by wasting energy squabbling with your logical ally. AFTER sufficient mindshare has been won from closed source--then squabble and be stupid if you want to! But meanwhile--cooperate on the breakaway!!!! It makes for a better race!!
There's a lot of cooperation between the BSD and the GNU/Linux people. At least I think that there is. And there are a lot of people who call themselves "Open Source Programmers" who cooperate well with people who call themselves "Free Software Programmers".
But at the end of the day the differences that I observe, personally, is that people that tend to use the term "Open Source" have a certain mentality that opening the source code is a useful business model, while people that use the term "Free Software" have more of a belief in the general freedoms to read, modify, and share software.
As such, I don't think that you'll ever hear Microsoft or Apple talk about how they're contributing to the Free Software community. They'll always use the term Open Source because (again, my opinion) they don't believe in Free Software as a corporation. I mean, how could they and still sell MS-Windows and OSX?
Anyhow, just an observation.
coding is life
Exactly. I can write Secret GPL code for the Department of Defence and be in compliance.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
However, props if you guys can distance yourself from GNU and the FSF. That will do wonders for notability.
Yeah, mad props yo. Let's forget those who began the movement...they're just hippies and commies and smelly anyway. Then we can be, um, "notable" and shit. Like Apple and Microsoft. Awww yeahhh.
Geeks like to think that they can ignore politics, you can leave politics alone, but politics won't leave you alone.-rms
We should realize that what divides us pales in comparison to what we have in common and that division and exclusion are harmful to us all. So we should reign in the name-callers on either side, and empower those people who know how to build cooperation, corporations, and positive feedback loops.
Ok. You first. Muzzle Richard and get back to us on how well that goes.
Thanks