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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."
So ''Open Source'' can refer to Free Software, but it can also refer to software not meeting the criteria above. It is also at times used to describe a particular software development model, although some parts of Free Software are developed in closed development models, and proprietary software is increasingly experimenting with open development approaches. This makes the term ''Open Source'' highly ambiguous, and indeed difficult for all areas that depend on precision in their language, such as science, law and politics.
So, on the one hand they are trying to say "there is no difference between free software and open source", and on the other they are pointing out that open source does not always mean the same thing as free software.
If they cannot even unify what they are saying with what they have said, what hope is there for them to unify developers?
If the FSF truly wants peace, then despite my admitted level of trolling in
their direction online in the past, I for one would actually be willing to
look at reconciliation; however I have some requests which I would like to
have met as a condition of such, personally.
- A fundamental recognition of two key facts, which the organisation has been
apparently unwilling to recognise in the past.
a) There are individuals in the world which, despite the organisation's best
efforts to the contrary, adamantly maintain opposing perspectives to that of
the FSF.
b) Said individuals have the right to exist. A world in which the FSF's
perspective was universal would be an extremely unhealthy and unbalanced one,
and certainly would not be one in which I for one would want to live. The FSF
does itself no favours when it holds itself as the exclusive arbiter of
appropriate ethical, social, or economic thought.
- The muzzling of Richard Stallman. Stallman is a divisive radical, and the
fundamental source of any problems I've ever had with the FSF. He causes
conflict, slows progress, and damages the open source community as a whole. He
is also utterly incapable of any form of compromise.
- The development of an ability to be realistic about potential threats. I
am talking here primarily about the supposed bogeyman of DRM. As I
predicted, the use of Digital Rights Management ultimately went nowhere in the
marketplace, and this is because the buying public are far more intelligent
and discerning than the FSF, sadly, tends to give them credit for.
One area which the FSF badly needs to work on, is its' perception of human
nature, both in its' positive and negative aspects. This, more than any
other, is perhaps the single main cognitive area in which the organisation is
critically lacking. There is an entirely egocentric fixation on what the
Foundation itself wants, rather than on external reality and what the rest of
the planet wants; especially considering that these two perspectives are
opposed far more often than they are in alignment. If the FSF had more of a
genuine understanding of what the buying public wants, they would have been
able to pre-emptively recognise that DRM was going to go nowhere, entirely
without any involvement from them whatsoever, and they could have directed
their energies to more genuinely productive persuits.
The Foundation needs to learn to understand that a recognition of both of
these perspectives, and seeking reconciliation and blending between them, is
the way forward. Radicalism is not a means of progress, and before any of the
Foundation's supporters argue that it has worked well enough in the past, they
would do well to remember that the majority of progress that has been made
towards the FSF's goals, has not actually been made due to the FSF itself, and
has in fact been made largely aside from it.
- A return to the generation of software, rather than activism, as a primary
focus. Software development was, I feel, not only the FSF's first role, but
its' most genuinely valuable. I do not (and did not, when it first happened)
feel that the relinquishment of the GNU Project's development to Red Hat was
appropriate. The FSF are a non-profit entity, and it makes a lot more sense
for such an entity to remain as the custodian of the software, than a
for-profit company.
- The repeal of version 3 of the General Public License. I strongly suspect
that this is one request which I am not going to be alone in making. Eben
Moglen's assurances to the contrary, version 3 of the GPL is something which
the FSF's radicals more or less alone want. It is not something which, from
everything I have seen, the majority of either the developer or the user
communities want.
Version 2 is a license which, while I perhaps still might not see it as being
appropriate for *every* situation, is an acceptable and j