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."

Comments

Pfah.

[guyminuslife]

Refrain from name-calling? What an idiot.

Re:Pfah.

[MrKaos]

How appropriate, you fight like a cow!

So? You fight like a farmer. ;-)

False friends, as well as false enemies

[Anonymous Coward]

There was a story in the Firehose a couple days ago that had links to NEC and Panasonic's "source code download" site for their Japanese Docomo phones.

They've been on the Linux bandwagon for years and have been giving away the source. However, they have added the extra stipulation that downloaders need to have actually bought the phone (and require the IMEI to prove it).

This is in direct violation of GPLv2's section 3b which requires the source be available to all.

Anyway, I thought that was interesting and wondered why it never reached the front page (it was orange, so interest was high). And seeing as how the current story is about false friends and false enemies, I thought it appropriate to point out how some of the biggest exploiters of Linux are also sometimes enemies of free software.

Re:False friends, as well as false enemies

[andy.ruddock]

Except that section 3b of GPL v2 says that the source code needs to made available to those for whom you make available copies of your work.
Nowhere does it say that you have to make copies of your work available for everybody, neither does it say that you have to make the source available to everybody.

What it does do is prevent anybody who already has copies of the work (obtained by legal/lawful means), and/or the source code, making it available to others.

Re:False friends, as well as false enemies

[flyingfsck]

Exactly. I can write Secret GPL code for the Department of Defence and be in compliance.

One should never RTFA, indeed ...

[foobsr]

From TFA: "One is to believe there was a substantial difference in the software referred to by the terms "Free Software" and "Open Source." There isn't."

This was when I stopped.

CC.

Re:One should never RTFA, indeed ...

[ShieldW0lf]

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.

Re:One should never RTFA, indeed ...

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

Re:One should never RTFA, indeed ...

[Brandybuck]

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.

Re:One should never RTFA, indeed ...

[david_thornley]

Why did you stop?

The Free Software Foundation and Open Source Initiative are very different in philosophy and how they present themselves. There are often serious disagreements on what is best to do on on legal and political issues.

However, when it comes to writing software, the two are very similar. They encourage the same things, and differ only slightly in the licenses they accept.

The software written by a Free Software developer out of ideology is basically indistinguishable from that written by an esr follower who just wants to use the bazaar technique of development. At this level, there are no differences.

Re:One should never RTFA, indeed ...

[skeeto]

This is specifically addressed in TFA. In fact, that's really what TFA is all about. Here is the exact quote again,

One is to believe there was a substantial difference in the software referred to by the terms "Free Software" and "Open Source."

He is referring to a specific definition -- the original definition -- for Open Source, which was practically the same as Free Software. Standing by itself there, without context, he seems inconsistent, but he's not. Now read down a bit,

Open Source is a failed re-branding effort over which its creators lost control, followed by brand degradation through abuse and over-extension into areas such as business and development models.

This is where the Open Source and Free Software divide when it comes to definitions. The brand Open Source was abused and stretched so that it is no longer consistent with Free Software. This makes his statements consistent with the official FSF stance: that Open Source and Free Software are now two different things.

Re:One should never RTFA, indeed ...

[skeeto]

If you hadn't stopped reading there you would understand the context that makes this statement true. Read the next paragraph and it will make sense. In fact, TFA addresses important differences between Open Source and Free Software.

Hint: in your quoted sentence he is referring to a specific, older definition for Open Source.

The Meaning Of "Free"

[Rary]

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.

Re:The Meaning Of "Free"

[TheRaven64]

I prefer Hippyware. Free Software is ambiguous because people think it means software-that-you-don't-pay-for. Open Source is ambiguous because people think it means software-with-source-code-you-can-see (but not necessarily have any right to modify or redistribute). Open Source is also bad marketing, because most people don't care about the source code (although they may care, from a business standpoint, about the associated benefits of having certain rights to the source code).

In contrast, no one I've spoken to has ever misinterpreted Hippyware. People either know what it means, or they ask. They never walk around thinking it means one thing when it means something else, a problem that both Open Source and Free Software share. Software Libre also works, but Hippyware rolls off the tongue a lot better.

Re:The Meaning Of "Free"

[maxume]

If I had mod points, I would mod him Goddamn-dirty-longhair.

Re:The Meaning Of "Free"

[flyingfsck]

The problem with understanding the true meaning of the word Free is due to a lack of schooling. Many people don't know English, history or political science. Free State = A type of republican state government (Irish Free State, Orange Free State, Freestate of Thuringia, also 19th century US states where slavery was outlawed). Free Trade = I think it is obvious that trade is not gratis. Live Free or Die (New Hampshire motto) - I think it is clear that NH is not a Gratis State. "We begin with the proposition that the right of freedom of thought protected by the First Amendment against state action includes both the right to speak freely and the right to refrain from speaking at all," Chief Justice Warren Burger wrote for the majority in Maynard.

why does open source need marketing?

[convolvatron]

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.

I'd love to..

[JonJ]

Hear RMS' take on this. :D

Re:I'd love to..

[JonJ]

I rarely get a shot at this. But here goes:

---> Joke

    o
   /|\     <- You
   / \

Okies

[Narpak]

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.

Re:Okies

[BadAnalogyGuy]

This was actually discussed a couple days ago here on /.

The topic was slightly different, but the parallels exist. Essentially, any difficult concept must be broken down into simpler but less accurate statements in order for the general public to digest them. So when a scientist sees a rise in atmospheric methane levels and has traced the rise to melting methane ice due to increased global temperatures, he needs to 1) explain it simply so that the layman can understand and 2) explain the consequences of the information.

So for any concept which you are hearing, it must be understood that a much more complex and nuanced explanation exists but you aren't getting it.

Take that into the public sphere. It is impossible to debate an issue on its merits, because the time necessary would be prohibitive. So we resort to simplifications and "dogma" to explain the difficult ideas expressed.

The problem is that the lay public is dumb and thinks that what they are hearing is God's Truth. The result is the ever spreading brutishness and lack of subtlety that we see in today's American culture.

Re:Okies

[johnlcallaway]

Except no on hears the name calling other than people like Greve. I don't hear it, because I'm not involved in it.

And since the large majority of people that use open source are also not involved in it, fixing it won't necessarily translate into additional users.

The two main reasons that companies I have worked in don't use open source software is either because they want a paid technician on the other end of the phone, or it was felt the quality wasn't as good.

I suggest Mr. Greve expend his energy on overcoming those two issues if he wants to expand the acceptance of open source software. One only has to wade through the mountains of crap on SourceForge to question whether it is worth the effort to search for the good stuff that surpasses commercial options, or just go buy something.

Re:Okies

[causality]

Take that into the public sphere. It is impossible to debate an issue on its merits, because the time necessary would be prohibitive.

I'd wager that time has very little to do with it. More like, debating issues on merits would fatally wound, kill, bury, and hold funeral services for this concept that all viewpoints are inherently equal. They're not. Some of them are supported by facts and reasoning.

For example, take the gun control issue. You know what I have never, ever once heard an anti-gun/pro-gun control individual comment on? The fact that every US state which has enacted conceal-carry permits has seen significant reductions in violent crime. They refuse to address this fact because this fact contradicts their position. Rather than consider whether their position no longer fits the available facts and whether it should be discarded and replaced with a different viewpoint, they just pretend not to notice the available facts. That means, these aren't "issues" at all that we're "debating", they are more like religious beliefs. The cost of doing things this way is seldom appreciated.

Ribbon!

[torreja]

We need a Ribbon!

Re:FOSS Brand?!

[Narpak]

The Catholic Church split and became the Church of England and the Catholic church.

Actually is was more like the protoChurch splitting into the Catholic Church the Greek Orthodox Church and some sects and orders that existed for a while there after before either being Assimilated, Exterminated or driven to some geographical region were they were practically unreachable.

Now a bit later Lutheran Protestants appeared and split from the Catholics. And AFTER that the King of England broke with the Pope and established a new order with the Crown as a the head of the English Church.

Of course this is EXTREME SIMPLIFICATIONS of complex historical processes and events. But the splitting of the English Church from the Catholic faith did not happen in a vacuum.

False Premise

[malevolentjelly]

Open source is a random barbarian horde of software developers. That would be like creating a brand for things you heard from "Some guy at a bar". Oh, I heard from some guy at a bar that open source software needs to create a unified brand. Isn't the open source community sort of intentionally decentralized? Creating a brand to unify this stuff would be actually very deceptive. The way distributions currently brand their components is probably about as honest and accurate as anyone should require from a product perspective.

There is no "official" open source organization. It's a concept.

Re:False Premise

[Rary]

But there is a brand whether or not it's intentionally created. The output of this "random barbarian horde of software developers" all falls under a single label, "open source", and therefore has the "open source" brand. He describes a brand as being "anyone's gut feeling". In other words, what is it that people think of when they hear "open source software"? Well, that's the brand. It may not have been shaped by anyone intentionally, but it still exists. So, he wants to shape it.

He also makes the point that the de facto brand is actually shaped by those who compete with open source. Microsoft, for example, shapes the open source brand through its marketing. Therefore, by not making a concerted effort to shape the brand in a positive way, the community is effectively allowing it to be shaped in a negative way.

Re:False Premise

[malevolentjelly]

But there is a brand whether or not it's intentionally created. The output of this "random barbarian horde of software developers" all falls under a single label, "open source", and therefore has the "open source" brand. He describes a brand as being "anyone's gut feeling". In other words, what is it that people think of when they hear "open source software"? Well, that's the brand. It may not have been shaped by anyone intentionally, but it still exists. So, he wants to shape it.

It is being branded, though- by Red Hat and Canonical and such. They each brand their own open source ecosystems, as does Mozilla. I believe the branding of open source should remain on a per project basis. As it stands in the mainstream, I would contend that open source is a "feature" moreso than a "brand".

It's not going to be a team effort...

However, props if you guys can distance yourself from GNU and the FSF. That will do wonders for notability.

Re:False Premise

[seandiggity]

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.

The reign in Spain

[Minwee]

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.

Can we also empower those people who know the difference between the words "reign", meaning the possession of power or authority, and "rein", which is the strap that you use to control a horse?

Then maybe we could rein in some of the worst abuses of the English language.

Re:The reign in Spain

[causality]

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.

Can we also empower those people who know the difference between the words "reign", meaning the possession of power or authority, and "rein", which is the strap that you use to control a horse?

Then maybe we could rein in some of the worst abuses of the English language.

Next thing ya know, you'll want people to stop calling themselves "editors" unless they are willing to proofread that single paragraph (a whole paragraph, what a tremendous burden huh?) before submitting it to an audience of many tens of thousands of people.

Branding

[Maximum Prophet]

Branding is what corporations use to add perceived value to merchandise. People will pay more for "Disney" brand shoes than the same shoe with "Bob" brand. Disney might not even sell the shoe, Bob may have paid Disney for use of it's brand.
Alternately, Bob could make better shoes to add value to it's shoes. Unfortunately, the consumer can't always see this value. People won't pay more for unperceived value. Unless Bob wants to build his brand as a high quality product, he can make more money paying Disney for their logo

This would be difficult to apply to "Free Software", because there's so much of it out there, of mixed quality. If it ever took off, and people began associating "Free Software" with quality, anyone could misappropriate the brand, and it's perceived value would fall.

A new brand is in order. Something like LibertySoft(tm) or FSFsoft(tm) that would apply to projects that met certain levels of quality and had a free enough license. Some organization like the FSF would have to own the trademark, and police misuses of the brand.

And what would that brand teach people?

[jbn-o]

Name-calling and quarrelling on either side is not helpful, and serves to hide the common base and interest in having a strong brand and powerful message.

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:

The idea of open source is that allowing users to change and redistribute the software will make it more powerful and reliable. But this is not guaranteed. Developers of proprietary software are not necessarily incompetent. Sometimes they produce a program which is powerful and reliable, even though it does not respect the users' freedom. How will free software activists and open source enthusiasts react to that?

A pure open source enthusiast, one that is not at all influenced by the ideals of free software, will say, "I am surprised you were able to make the program work so well without using our development model, but you did. How can I get a copy?" This attitude will reward schemes that take away our freedom, leading to its loss.

The free software activist will say, "Your program is very attractive, but not at the price of my freedom. So I have to do without it. Instead I will support a project to develop a free replacement." If we value our freedom, we can act to maintain and defend it.

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.

Careful!

[Brandybuck]

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.

Re:Careful!

[crayne]

Without Linux, GNU would not run at all. All GNU software needs an Operating System to work

Linux is not an operating system, it is a kernel; together the GNU tools and Linux make up an operating system.

Re:FOSS Brand?!

[gbjbaanb]

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.

The Bike Race Breakaway Metaphor

[MarkvW]

In bicycle racing oftentimes a group of people zoom out ahead of the pack (the peloton) and try to race to the front.

The only way those people can even hope to get to the end before the peloton is if they work together and share the aerodynamic load of breaking the wind. Sometimes they work together harmoniously right to almost the very end--then they race it out between themselves.

Most times though, for various tactical reasons, they get squirreley with each other and refuse to cooperate evenly to maximize speed. While they're squirreling around, the peloton bears down on them and swallows them up.

BSD and GNU are on a breakaway from closed source software. They each want an ecosystem where sharing and cooperation are the primary values. They each take different routes. BND is not as radical as GNU, but GNU does more to hamper closed software. Nevertheless, they are each in a breakaway from the closed source peloton.

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!!

Re:The Bike Race Breakaway Metaphor

[Qubit]

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.

Re:The Bike Race Breakaway Metaphor

[Braino420]

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!!

That's really inspiring and stuff, but, like all analogies, leaves some things out. This is why analogies are a tool for explaining things, not for coming to some logical conclusion (there is no Proof by Analogy in discrete math). Many of the OSI crowd just really don't care how close the dreaded "proprietary software" comes to competing with them, they just want to do their thing the best way they know how. Wiping out proprietary software is the goal of the FSF guys, it's a side effect for the OSI guys.

And what is all of this "wasted energy" nonsense? How is having ideological discussions wasted energy? These users of software, for the most part, don't really care what their software is licensed under. This is something that's really only discussed by the developers of software (and possibly their employers), and so maybe if the OSI and FSF were to join forces to get the proprietary software devs, this might make sense. But I don't see discussion of ideologies as something that hampers the use of F/OSS.

On top of this, I see most of the animosity from the FSF side; they are the ones who are all hung up on ideology and get angry when people *gasp* even explain how to install proprietary software. I know, it's not fair to equate RMS' ideology with that of the entire FSF organization, but he /is/ on /your/ side.

Re:The Bike Race Breakaway Metaphor

[cptdondo]

I remember watching the TDF a few years ago. There was a breakaway that opened up a huge gap. As the kilometers wore on, riders who couldn't keep the pace dropped from the breakaway and got swallowed by the peleton. Finally, there were just two riders left. They knew one would take the stage. At the 1KM banner, they slowed, shook hands, and each went for the finish.

First cooperation, then competition.

Bruce Perens' take

[CarpetShark]

I think it's pretty clear what RMS would say, and (hopefully) why.

What's more interesting is Bruce Perens' take on it. Bruce founded the Open Source Institute with Eric S. Raymond, but Bruce himself has stated that "it's time to talk about Free Software again" as opposed to Open Source, due to the unintended conceptual dilution that Open Source has been exposed to.

Excellent Points

[Fantom42]

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.

Loosely translated...

[TrebleJunkie]

"Somebody please tell RMS to StFU."

I don't get this.

[DeVilla]

Wait. This is the FSFE. They have something to do with the FSF, right?

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