{"id":904,"date":"2009-04-01T01:56:48","date_gmt":"2009-04-01T06:56:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=904"},"modified":"2010-07-19T00:23:08","modified_gmt":"2010-07-19T05:23:08","slug":"beyond-the-rhetorical-fictions-about-free-software","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=904","title":{"rendered":"Beyond the rhetorical fictions about &#8220;free software&#8221;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A friend directed me to a <a href=\"http:\/\/volokh.com\/archives\/archive_2009_03_29-2009_04_04.shtml#1238473610\">comment thread over at the Volokh Conspiracy<\/a>, a blog I occasionally read and considerably respect.  The response I ended up writing is substantial enough that I think it&#8217;s worth posting here.  <\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>I am the person who promulgated the term &#8220;open source&#8221;, and the senior founder of the OSI. As it happens, I&#8217;m also a semi-regular Volokh Conspiracy reader.<\/p>\n<p>Alas, there is a fair amount of misinformation in this thread. Beginning with the misuse of &#8220;open source&#8221; to mean code with source that is available for inspection but not freely redistributable and modifiable; this is incorrect, and everyone who self-describes as an &#8220;open source&#8221; or &#8220;free software&#8221; programmer knows it&#8217;s incorrect. There is no universal term for accessible\/non-redistributable\/non-modifiable code, but I like to use &#8220;source under glass&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Open source&#8221; means code with a license that complies with the Open Source Definition (OSD). If you try launching a source-under-glass project on any of the community project-hosting sites such as SourceForge, Berlios, Alioth, gna, or Savannah, they will reject it. Even Microsoft &#8212; which is, to put it mildly, no friend of open source and would love to see the term neutered&#8211; recognizes the OSD as authoritative, having submitted licenses to OSI for approval.<\/p>\n<p>As to whether &#8220;open source&#8221; and &#8220;free software&#8221; are synonymous: If you&#8217;re talking about software, the answer is &#8220;yes, for all practical purposes&#8221;; ever since Apple revised the APSL ten years ago, the exceptions have been minor and technical, involving licenses that are very little used.<\/p>\n<p>Furthermore, there is no boundary in the developer community. No &#8220;open source&#8221; advocate refuses to work on &#8220;free software&#8221; projects, or vice-versa. RMS insists that the free software community is separate unto itself, but the actual behavior of hackers falsifies this claim.<\/p>\n<p>If you&#8217;re talking developer philosophy, the difference is mainly one of marketing &#8211; what kind of arguments you use to evangelize to people who are not yet part of the community. &#8220;Free software&#8221; advocates tend to follow RMS&#8217;s lead and argue in a prescriptive, moralist vein. &#8220;Open source&#8221; advocates tend to follow my lead in arguing in a consequentialist, pragmatic way.<\/p>\n<p>However, the situation is not quite as symmetrical as that might seem to imply. RMS claims (rightly) to be the founder and sole ideologue of &#8220;free software&#8221;. I make no corresponding claim; I consider myself part of a hacker tradition of open source that long predates &#8220;free software&#8221;, and only one of a collegium of leaders, theorists, and culture heroes which, in fact, *includes* RMS. I neither have nor want the normative authority over that larger tradition that he does over his faction, and in fact have spent a considerable amount of energy *avoiding* becoming the larger movement&#8217;s &#8220;indispensible man&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>RMS likes to maintain that there is an &#8220;open source&#8221; camp opposed to his &#8220;free software&#8221; movement. I think it is more accurate to describe his &#8220;free software&#8221; movement as a purist faction within the larger open-source community. This description better covers the actual working behavior of the people who self-describe with these labels.<\/p>\n<p>In conclusion, I will note that the &#8220;open source&#8221;\/&#8221;free software&#8221; distinction, to the extent it&#8217;s actually meaningful at all, matters a great deal more to the &#8220;free software&#8221; advocates than it does to the &#8220;open source&#8221; advocates. People outside the community may safely write it off as the standard sort of zealot-vs.-pragmatist hoo-hah that you see in reform movements of all kinds; as usual with such things, it is under most circumstances a dispute that can safely be ignored by everyone else.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A friend directed me to a comment thread over at the Volokh Conspiracy, a blog I occasionally read and considerably respect. The response I ended up writing is substantial enough that I think it&#8217;s worth posting here.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-904","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-software","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/904","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=904"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/904\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2309,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/904\/revisions\/2309"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=904"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=904"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=904"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}