Beyond the rhetorical fictions about &#8220;free software&#8221;
<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>
<p><span id="more-904"></span></p>
<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>
<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>
<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>
<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>
<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>
<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>
<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>
<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>
<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>
