3 ms·

Open source != free

vezzy-fnord 11y ago
The Travis-CI core appears to be under the MIT license, so it would be both open source and free (the definitions mostly overlap).
adekok 11y ago
The ISC DHCP server is "open source", in that the source is available. It's "free" in that anyone can download it and use it. But... try getting patches in. Unless you're a paying member of the ISC consortium, you can't. There are performance problems going back a decade which are firmly in the "won't fix" category. OpenSSL is similar.
- mkesper 11y ago
  This could be resolved by forking.
- simias 11y ago
  That's not really the same issue, people are free to accept contributions or not, if you're not happy with the state of things you can fork the project. Like GCC/EGCS back in the days for example. TFA is about ubuntu making forking difficult.
- bad_user 11y ago
  Open source software (OSS) means the source code is available under an OSI approved license. While the term could not be trademarked due to the process being impractical, we like to be precise in order to not dilute what is otherwise a very useful term. "Free software" also means source-code being distributed under an FSF approved license. Unfortunately English doesn't have an equivalent for "libre", like romance languages do, with "free" being overloaded. So of course, usage of "free" has a long history of being overridden depending on context, going back to freemium/freeware/shareware. This is why context is important and why people then feel the need to be precise about the kind of free we are talking about - free as in beer or as in speech. You're talking about free as in beer and in our context Free Software really refers to FSF approved licensing. And Wikipedia does agree. Of course, the set of licenses that are FSF approved and OSI approved does overlap, though in theory you could have some differences, because the definitions are different. For example I think AGPL should not be OSI approved. But I digress. Back to the point I want to make - source code being able does not make a software open source and having the binaries free as in beer does not make it free software.

Open source != free

The Travis-CI core appears to be under the MIT license, so it would be both open source and free (the definitions mostly overlap).

adekok 11y ago

The ISC DHCP server is "open source", in that the source is available. It's "free" in that anyone can download it and use it. But... try getting patches in. Unless you're a paying member of the ISC consortium, you can't. There are performance problems going back a decade which are firmly in the "won't fix" category. OpenSSL is similar.

mkesper 11y ago
This could be resolved by forking.
simias 11y ago
That's not really the same issue, people are free to accept contributions or not, if you're not happy with the state of things you can fork the project. Like GCC/EGCS back in the days for example. TFA is about ubuntu making forking difficult.
bad_user 11y ago
Open source software (OSS) means the source code is available under an OSI approved license. While the term could not be trademarked due to the process being impractical, we like to be precise in order to not dilute what is otherwise a very useful term. "Free software" also means source-code being distributed under an FSF approved license. Unfortunately English doesn't have an equivalent for "libre", like romance languages do, with "free" being overloaded. So of course, usage of "free" has a long history of being overridden depending on context, going back to freemium/freeware/shareware. This is why context is important and why people then feel the need to be precise about the kind of free we are talking about - free as in beer or as in speech. You're talking about free as in beer and in our context Free Software really refers to FSF approved licensing. And Wikipedia does agree. Of course, the set of licenses that are FSF approved and OSI approved does overlap, though in theory you could have some differences, because the definitions are different. For example I think AGPL should not be OSI approved. But I digress. Back to the point I want to make - source code being able does not make a software open source and having the binaries free as in beer does not make it free software.