3 ms·

I think there are 3 wars that overlap but not fully. (1) Pragmatic debates about the usefulness of copyleft vs. BSD/X11/MIT/etc. in various situations (and for

by mwfunk 8y ago

I think there are 3 wars that overlap but not fully. (1) Pragmatic debates about the usefulness of copyleft vs. BSD/X11/MIT/etc. in various situations (and for various goals), (2) a (tribal, and mostly imaginary?) "business vs. hackers" narrative, and (3) RMS vs. everyone else. OSI itself doesn't figure prominently in how I think of open source. I realize Open Source^tm is something that OSI legally defines, but going all the way back to the endless Usenet arguments in the '90s, the "open source vs. free software" conflict was never really about OSI vs. the FSF (IMO). It was more about accepting a multitude of licenses as acceptable alternatives, vs. adherence to the strictest and most complicated one (plus accepting Richard Matthew Stallman as your personal lord and savior). It also felt like "open source" meant promoting a bunch of things as a common good, but "free software" meant promoting something very specific as good, and calling out a bunch of other things as evil. It's like working for a charity vs. being in someone's army. I wonder how much this contributes to which side is more appealing to someone, based on their values and personality. Maybe this has become way more convoluted since the '90s, but I always considered open source to be a superset of free software. All GPL'd software is open source, but not all open source software is GPL'd. It's less of an "x vs. y" conflict, and more of a "(x, y, or z) vs. x" conflict, with a bunch of cultural and personal baggage tacked on to it.

caf 8y ago
I was around for those arguments in the 90s as well, and that's not at all my take on it. The FSF was always very clear that the BSD-type licenses (at least once the minor issue of the "advertising clause" was dealt with) were Free Software licenses in their opinion. The Debian Free Software Guidelines always covered a wide variety of permissive "open source" licenses, and in fact the DFSG was used as the basis of the OSI's Open Source definition. So I've never seen Open Source as a superset of Free Software - or vice-versa. Rather, they have always been almost or even exactly the same set. It's not, and never has been, about alternative taxa - instead, the difference was always more one of marketing. It's not a question of What - it's a question of Why. The Why of Free Software is "So that people are free to share and modify the software they use", and the Why of Open Source is "Because this method of development creates better software.". If a new movement does crystallise, it will be because neither of these Whys satisfy the new constituency, and their new answer to Why Permissively License Your Software? will be their rallying point.

by mwfunk 8y ago

caf 8y ago

I was around for those arguments in the 90s as well, and that's not at all my take on it. The FSF was always very clear that the BSD-type licenses (at least once the minor issue of the "advertising clause" was dealt with) were Free Software licenses in their opinion. The Debian Free Software Guidelines always covered a wide variety of permissive "open source" licenses, and in fact the DFSG was used as the basis of the OSI's Open Source definition. So I've never seen Open Source as a superset of Free Software - or vice-versa. Rather, they have always been almost or even exactly the same set. It's not, and never has been, about alternative taxa - instead, the difference was always more one of marketing. It's not a question of What - it's a question of Why. The Why of Free Software is "So that people are free to share and modify the software they use", and the Why of Open Source is "Because this method of development creates better software.". If a new movement does crystallise, it will be because neither of these Whys satisfy the new constituency, and their new answer to Why Permissively License Your Software? will be their rallying point.