Why Open Source misses the point of Free Software

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.html?

by octopus • 15 years ago

123 117 15 years ago

hasenj2• 15 years ago

Or, why Free Software misses the point of Open Source :)

Open Source is about the developers. Free Software is about the end users (or, it's supposed to be).

In reality, Free Software ends up being useful only for programmers, hackers, technical people, and well, institutions which require programmers, hackers and technical people to run and grow their infrastructure (such as Universities and Governments).

Free Software (as an ideology) offers nothing to the typical end user of, say, the iPhone. It offers a lot to Apple (the iPhone makers).

cschwarm4• 15 years ago

I personally think, the user/developer distinction is misleading. I agree with Stallman that Open Source is about different goals and values:

* Open Source supporters say "Some software should be..."

* Free Software supporters say "All software should be..."

In this regard, you're right: Free Software misses the point of Open Source, namely that the goals and values of Free Software are simply wrong.

code_duck• 15 years ago

You make it sound as if universities and governments (and Apple?) do not offer services which benefit people who do not directly use the software themselves.

SwellJoe11• 15 years ago

"Open Source is about the developers. Free Software is about the end users (or, it's supposed to be)."

In an ideal world, the user and the developer are one in the same.

I don't mean everyone who uses a piece of software should have to know the code intimately; merely that they should have the freedom to see it, modify it and learn from it, should the need or desire arise. The power of the Free Software movement is that it created an entire generation of users who are also developers. Most of the people here at HN have Free and Open Source software to thank for their programming skills. You're mostly too young to remember the world in which code was closed, by default, and you had to learn without the benefit of an infinite variety of examples to peruse.

"Free Software (as an ideology) offers nothing to the typical end user of, say, the iPhone."

Which is why it is important to educate the next generation of the importance of Free Software (or Open Source, though having an ideology to back it might not be such a bad things), so that the rate of software advancement and innovation continues to accelerate, and so that the gap between the technology haves and have nots does not grow further and faster.

To dismiss the ideology, I think, is to dismiss the importance of a free software culture; our Internet exists as it does today thanks to free software.

Note that I'm not discussing licenses here, but the general culture of software. If we have a culture of sharing, which RMS and the FSF has been instrumental in creating (and the GPL was merely a part of that), we have a culture in which young programmers can learn from the experienced, and a culture in which barriers to entry are not as economic in nature.

I think it's worth teaching kids the value of a free software culture, and working to keep that culture thriving going forward, despite the fact that many major corporations have a vested interest in seeing free software contained to the world of nerds and hackers.

brudgers7• 15 years ago

>"In an ideal world, the user and the developer are one in the same."

My vision of utopia does not include helping my mother debug her cell phone - explaining gmail is bad enough.

EGreg3• 15 years ago

This is true, but I would also like to point out how many people became web developers because they could look at the source code being fed to the browser -- through its View Source menu item. That menu item alone made website code basically open source (very few websites obfuscated it). You could see HTML, CSS and Javascript out in the open.

Certainly, free software is a grand revolution in the principles that guide innovation, and protect people's use of the software. But the game is won often by making better tools to actually make the open source happen. Look at git and github. Look at the practical system set up by linux developers before git. Look at wikipedia and the wiki. I could go on.

I have a big respect for the ability of better tools to change people's behavior patterns and habits, and over time change the world.

rimantas• 15 years ago

> In an ideal world, the user and the developer are one in > the same.

What a horrible horrible horrible world. Luckily, that ship has sailed. In the ideal world everyone has tools which just happen to work for whatever particular task user has, be it a composer or doctor without the need to wast the time for fixing them.

This precise sentence I quoted explains why stallmans are more and more out of touch with the reality and the real needs of computer users. Computers are just tools for the majority of they users, just a means to get task done.

hasenj2• 15 years ago

I respect FSF and RMS very much, and in fact I think if it weren't for them, Unix would've died, and Linux wouldn't really take off, maybe even BSD wouldn't have existed, and Mac wouldn't exist in the form we know it today (that is, as a Unix based OS).

Having said that, RMS's ideology is not inherently good per se; it's somewhat radical, but without the existence of radicalism, we would've ended up in a world of proprietry only software. In other words, the Open Source movement's "utopia" can't exist without RMS-like radicals who push strongly towards a world of only free software.

As a result, we get an equilibrium where all the tools for development and infrastructure are free/open-source, while end-user products are not always free.

weaksauce• 15 years ago

I am not that old and I remember a time where there was no open source movement. I most certainly do not have open source to thank for my coding skills. I learned to program when I was 3 on an apple IIe in "apple basic" There was no open source going on then, no stack overflow to ask someone else what to do, no mentors in my neck of the woods either as home computers were fairly new at that time.

rick8882• 15 years ago

"I don't mean everyone who uses a piece of software should have to know the code intimately; merely that they should have the freedom to see it, modify it and learn from it, should the need or desire arise."

Hopefully, in your ideal world, this doesn't take away the freedoms of the developers that don't want to release their code.

"You're mostly too young to remember the world in which code was closed, by default, and you had to learn without the benefit of an infinite variety of examples to peruse"

This would have happened even without the GNU license. Anything that can be digital is being shared on the Internet, regardless of the license.

"and so that the gap between the technology haves and have nots does not grow further and faster."

This doesn't really make any sense. Most people will never look at the source code...so the absence of a license that gives you the right to tinker with the inner workings of an application won't really have an effect on the "technology haves and have nots". We should be more concerned with people that can't eat.

"Note that I'm not discussing licenses here, but the general culture of software. If we have a culture of sharing, which RMS and the FSF has been instrumental in creating (and the GPL was merely a part of that), we have a culture in which young programmers can learn from the experienced, and a culture in which barriers to entry are not as economic in nature."

Which is funny because this right here is devaluing programmers' salaries every day. Because there are so many free apps out there, companies can hire less experienced developers for less pay (IE: mechanics instead of engineers). It's one of those things that nobody will notice until it's too late. I suspect at this point, we will start to see programmer unions to keep wages at an inflated level. So, when your company decides to replace you with someone cheaper or goes over to India or the Philippines, don't complain.

I also don't think the word "free" should be used to describe GNU software. It implies free, as in price. It also implies that you can do what you want with it. If a corporation decides to change the code around, redistribute, and close-source it, they will get sued. This doesn't sound very free to me.

Even if they closed-sourced the application, the original source code is still free. You just don't get the changes (which were never yours in the first place).

pronik• 15 years ago

> In an ideal world, the user and the developer are one in the same.

I have always understood this freedom as "You are free to find someone you like who'd be able to change it and not be forced to make use of your expensive support contract with the one and only vendor". As mentioned elsewhere, there are people who needn't know anything about code, but they'd profit from the software being free too.

noibl• 15 years ago

As he admits, "Open source is a development methodology; free software is a social movement." A comparison of the two is apples-to-oranges.

sp332• 15 years ago

In the Free Software model, there's no such thing as an end-user. Everyone gets to be a developer (for themselves or their friends). That's why it's so developer-friendly.

moron4hire3• 15 years ago

unfortunately, when you build your software on "everyone gets to be a developer", more often than not it comes out as "everyone has to be a developer".

tbrownaw• 15 years ago

Yes, egcs and xemacs (and at least partly clang/llvm I think) are shining examples of the FSF's developer-friendliness.

mvalle2• 15 years ago

"In reality, Free Software ends up being useful only for programmers, hackers, technical people,"

That is like saying that freedom of speech is only useful for journalists.

You don't have to exercise a freedom to benefit from it. You benefit from others exercising it too. Whether a journalist exposes government corruption, or a security experts independently audits OpenSSL, everyone benefits of the relevant freedom being exercised.

You don't have to be a programmer for benefiting from DeCSS. You don't have to be a hacker to benefit from Apache. You don't have to be a technical person to benefit from WordPress.

The same applies to the reversed, you don't have to be a programmer to suffer from DRM, vendor lock-in, or nag-ware.

rick8882• 15 years ago

"The same applies to the reversed, you don't have to be a programmer to suffer from DRM, vendor lock-in, or nag-ware."

ahh, so you don't want software to be commercial, is that it?

ErrantX• 15 years ago

>Open Source is about the developers. Free Software is about the end users (or, it's supposed to be).

Yes, this.

This might be an unpopular view but "free software" (in the sense talked about here) is unencumbered for the users only. For developers it is encumbered (via the GPL). Open Source makes a different trade-off for the same gain.

This is the thing Stallman consistently misses; that Open Source and Free Software are simply two different solutions to a similar issue. Free Software sacrifices the freedom of developers when reusing the code. Open Source sacrifices a developers future porential ability to keep all uses of the code freely available.

He throws out the word ethical, I think, because it makes FS sound better. But the bottom line is that both ideals have underlying issues and problems; the brilliant thing is that there is a choice between the two, and we are free to pick the one that makes the trade-off we prefer.

The really great thing is that the real world is not as black and white as FS & OS; we can mix and match various aspects for our own preference :)

That is the point of freedom.

I suppose I can't fault Stallman for promoting his personal choice as best he is able.

aniket_ray• 15 years ago

I'm not a big fan on GPL anymore.

When I create some software I prefer the user of my software to have all freedoms including the freedom to embed it in closed source software.

emilsedgh• 15 years ago

Its not about gpl vs. bsd-like licenses. Its about free software vs. open source software.

bsd-like licenses are still 'free'.

_delirium• 15 years ago

GPL-like licenses are still 'open' by OSI standards as well. So yeah, the permissive-license v. copyleft argument isn't the same one as the Free v. Open argument, though perhaps there's some correlation between what views people have on each one.

bad_user4• 15 years ago

Wouldn't you hate it if you did something, like giving money to a poor fellow, and then people are using your good deed to market their ideology (like communism perhaps); even though you think it's wrong?

Now imagine how some open-source authors feel.

bhickey• 15 years ago

Can you articulate your concern?

Are you specifically objecting to the 'tivoisation' clause of the GPLv3, or has your opinion on the GPL changed, or something else? The spirit that you seem to describe is, I believe, embodied by the LGPLv2 (minus the clause that allows you to convert LGPL -> GPL.)

zzzeek• 15 years ago

I've been warned on many occasions that the LGPL is not trusted to cover dynamic languages like Python very well since its verbiage is specific to C linkers and compilers.

SwellJoe11• 15 years ago

And I prefer my software to remain open no matter who works on it or distributes it. So, I use GPL.

Amazing how people can have different priorities and different beliefs. (And, amazing how one can abuse the word "free" or "open" in either case to mean two very different things.)

protomyth• 15 years ago

> amazing how one can abuse the word "free" or "open" in > either case to mean two very different things

It seems to happen a lot in technology and the naming of bills in congress. It has got to the point where I start to ignore the words.

"Net Neutrality" is the latest phrase that has a lot of meanings depending on who you talk to, but has no actual technical or judicial meaning. I could accept a technical definition that has a meaning, but not this two word label that doesn't. For example, if I said "I was against port blocking or banning protocols except by the end user", it has some meaning.

My definition of these weasel words (tis a shame open and free are among them) is if someone says the phrase "I support X" and it gives me no real knowledge of their actual beliefs.

dwc11• 15 years ago

> And I prefer my software to remain open no matter who works on it or distributes it. So, I use GPL.

BSD license accomplishes that just fine. BSD licensed code has been taken, extended, modified and used in proprietary products for decades, and yet the original contribution remains open.

I think that what you object to is that someone can take your code and make money using it in a closed source project, perhaps modifying it in the process. If that makes you unhappy then GPL will serve your desires better.

But saying a BSD license won't keep your code open is not true. It may seem like a nit, but it's one that matters.

kemiller• 15 years ago

I just wish someone would give Stallman the memo.

moron4hire3• 15 years ago

But how can I possibly close your software? I can't stop you from distributing your library in the original form that you created it in. So your software will always be free, regardless of whether or not I abide by the GPL.

brudgers7• 15 years ago

>"I prefer my software to remain open no matter who works on it or distributes it. So, I use GPL."

There are other licenses which will insure that your software remains free and open. GPL requires that mine become free and open as well...and that's fine in so far as it goes.

Structurally, however, the copyleft movement only works so long as there is a system of copyright protections, powerful institutions for enforcing them, and the threat of severe sanctions for violating them. In other words, the copyleft movement is built on the same foundation as its antithesis. Both copyright and copyleft depend on the author's right to restrict future use.

bonch• 15 years ago

Your software would still be open under a BSD license. Using it in a closed-source project doesn't automatically remove the existence of the open source version.

bad_user4• 15 years ago

Free as in MySQL and Java?

kiba• 15 years ago

I stopped caring and made my software public domain. Incidentally, nothing really happens until you become popular.

stephth• 15 years ago

As far as I understand it, the problem with public domain is it's not a license, but a meaning, and this meaning varies between countries. A completely permissive license (if well written) could be more permissive than PD in some parts of the world, since it's specific.

dkersten• 15 years ago

I agree, though I dislike public domain simply because in some countries it isn't recognized and becomes completely unusable. For that reason, I prefer an unresitrictive license like BSD/MIT, or better yet, something like the WTFPL[1].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WTFPL

billswift2• 15 years ago

With the way copyright has been mangled in the last 35 years, public domain may not be safe - I have seen several people commenting that there is no way, since the copyright changes in the late 1970s, to affirmatively put your work in the public domain. Because of that risk, the WTFPL - Do What The Fuck You Want To Public License, http://sam.zoy.org/wtfpl/ , or an equivalent, is safer for potential users. Note that on the page I linked, it is pointed out that some non-Anglosphere countries didn't have a public domain in the first place.

dedward• 15 years ago

Agreed. The cool thing about being the copyright holder is you are free to release things under as few or as many different terms as you want.

I personally prefer to release software under the GPL initially, and then release under other licenses if I want to allow usage in those ways the GPL doesn't permit. Maybe that's a commercial deal with someone, maybe it's just changing the license to bsd, or maybe just making it public domain.

What I can't stand are holy wars about licenses and this whole church of "GPL means you have to give back"... or anyone talking about the "spirit" of these projects. Copyright is copyright, and licenses are licenses, and if someone wants to do a project with multiple developers and not take care of handling copyright assignment issues (in other words, make a mess, or just let hte project become a GPL free-ride) then that's their choice....

thyrsus• 15 years ago

Do you refuse contributions (bug fixes/enhancements) the ownership of which is not explicitly assigned to you? What is the license status of those changes?

Jach• 15 years ago

I never really got this line of thought. "I want my users to have all these freedoms, and then the freedom to deny all these freedoms to their users of this same base." It always sounded like "I want these people to have the power of voting, and then have the power to restrict others from voting."

Anyway, I went from GPL to BSD/MIT back to GPL (for "large" projects; small projects are public domain or MIT). I'd rather chain people with freedom while we have the copyright laws to do it than hope people will respect the freedoms I want others to have.

jackolas2• 15 years ago

To be honest, I'd license my work in another license for someone other than the GPL if they asked me. I just don't like the idea of granting everyone the rights the BSD license allows for without at least asking first.

schallis• 15 years ago

Unfortunately, "Open Source" is easier to market than "Free Software". The real benefits of true free software evidence themselves in the end and that's what counts, not what you call it.

Edit: It is however important to distinguish between free software and thinly veiled proprietary software marketed as Open Source.

dasil003• 15 years ago

What about distinguishing between non-free, but substantially open software (measured by ease of patch submission) vs proprietary software with the occasional code dump?

btilly• 15 years ago

Free software offers the end user benefits that the end user only rarely understands or appreciates.

Open source offers developers benefits that lots of developers understand and appreciate.

Therefore open source is a much better marketing tactic. (Which is exactly what it was designed to be.)

prodigal_erik2• 15 years ago

Anyone who's ever taken their car to an independent mechanic (rather than back to the dealer) ought to understand a key end user benefit of free software: you aren't limited by the interests of its creator. I'm confused that nobody seems to get this.

bad_user4• 15 years ago

I get it, but it is also a bad analogy.

Cars can't be repaired with a quick update over the wire.

EGreg3• 15 years ago

If they only called it Liberating Software, they wouldn't have had this happen. After all, open source software is also free (as in, costs nothing). But liberating software sounds like it confers freedom on the person -- actually liberating them.

Remember, branding is important.

billswift2• 15 years ago

Open source (as in BSD, MIT, WTFPL) are more liberating than "Free Software" (GPL). They greatly enlarge your opportunities in how you use the software.

mvalle2• 15 years ago

Free Software is defined as software released under a license that follows the definition of Free Software ( http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html ).

BSD, MIT and WTFPL are all on the list of officially verified Free Software licenses: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html and are thus "Free Software".

Open Source, similarly, is defined as software released under a license that follows the definition of Open Source Software ( http://www.opensource.org/docs/osd ). The OSI also has a list of approved licenses: http://www.opensource.org/licenses/alphabetical

adolfojp• 15 years ago

I vote for Freedom Software. It has a nice ring to it and it removes the ambiguity.

jarin2• 15 years ago

Then we can change it back to French Software later.

cookiecaper2• 15 years ago

Stallman's insistence on unlimited and unrestricted redistribution at a price not exceeding cost is the critical flaw with the free software movement. While I agree that this is good and should be encouraged where possible, if there were a license or some support for persons that allowed access to and modification of the code and redistribution of the code only to persons who were appropriately licensed by the copyright owner, then I think we'd have a much better ecosystem here.

Everyone would weld the hoods of their cars shut if leaving it open meant they had to give the car away for free. Since it doesn't, most people are free to access the internals of their vehicles and do whatever they like. The same principle should apply to software -- if we make it reasonably easy for people to leave the hood open but still make some money, there'd be more freedom to go around for everyone.

Omega191• 15 years ago

This is comparing apples to oranges; you don't lose the possession of software when you share it.

cookiecaper2• 15 years ago

You do lose the ability to make money off of software licenses when you include a stipulation that every recipient is free to redistribute your software's source as far and as much as possible at a price not exceeding the cost of the reproduction and distribution of the code, and that he is free to resell binaries of said software at any price. As we see with RHEL, if you try to do so, something like CentOS will come in and spoil the party.

There are times when this kind of sharing is good, but I believe if we were interested less in economic zealotry and more interested in individual freedom to control the software that runs on one's computer, we'd see a lot more people distributing source code. That would ultimately produce a net increase in freedom for computer users, even if the rules say you can only share modifications with people that have a rightful license.

Those that want to license under a copyleft are by all means free to do so, but we shouldn't exclude people that would be willing to distribute source code so that their users can control the program themselves, but who are not willing to switch to a support or subscription based business model. You can't make much significant money selling GPL'd software, you only make money by selling support contracts to BigCo. And that model is not applicable to everyone, even if it works out OK for database systems and Linux distributions.

Whether it's simple to copy or not, it's not simple to implement or design, and implementers and designers should be compensated even if their work can be reproduced at minimal cost after its initial production and release. A car's physical properties that make it much more difficult to copy have nothing to do with whether the hoods should be opened or shut, and whether rightful owners should be free to tinker around inside.

w1ntermute• 15 years ago

Does it bother anyone else that people circumvent the dupe-prevention code on HN by adding a CGI question mark to the end of the URL?

This link was submitted quite a while ago[0] without the question mark, and it clearly didn't gain a lot of traction, so in this case it was a good idea to resubmit it. However, it seems wrong that the dupe-prevention code isn't more sophisticated.

0: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2000239

moron4hire3• 15 years ago

All I know is that the proponents of Free Software are constantly trying to tell me what to think and tell me what my ideals should be, whereas just-plain-Open-Sourcers are happy enough to see that I'm using their software, regardless of what I do with it.

krschultz• 15 years ago

With a BSD or Apache license you are giving your project away for anyone to use how they see fit.

With GPL you are giving your project away only to those willing to work with you on improving it.

The arguments back and forth are so tiresome when they don't recognize that sometimes one license makes a lot of sense and sometimes the other license makes a lot of sense. There will never be one license to rule them all.

jarin2• 15 years ago

Exactly, I've always argued that Free Software is best for infrastructure and developer tools, and Open Source is best for everything else (like libraries for end user software).

wingo• 15 years ago

I read these comments and think that this article wasn't directed at HN readers; it was directed at free software people.

dools• 15 years ago

if the term free is ambiguous, why not just call it Freedom Software? I suppose may have the unfortunate side effect of being co-opted by patriotic zealots :)

archangel_one3• 15 years ago

He's said elsewhere that "Freedom Software" was an existing trademark.

tzs2• 15 years ago

My problem with Free Software as opposed to Open Source is that Free Software people have a greater tendency to end up doing things like this:

http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.distributions.gnu-linux-...

(The whole thread, not just the specific post linked to).

tzs2• 15 years ago

OK, my other problem with Free Software is when Free Software proponents try to tell me that GPL is more free than BSD because GPL stops the software from becoming part of non-free software.

It's like saying people in the US are more free than those in the EU, because the US restricts travel to non-free Cuba.

archangel_one3• 15 years ago

It's not really. The concept of a derived work does not apply well to countries, but if it did that wouldn't be an example of it. What you're describing sounds more like a Free software web browser that would only communicate with Free web servers, which of course isn't what the GPL says at all.

gte910h• 15 years ago

Free software people continually miss the value of just letting people use their stuff to do whatever.

Letting people put back patches if they want to, but otherwise do what the hell they feel like is powerful, useful and practical for many more applications than the GPL et al licenses.

Some of us like sharing, but also like selling software and not giving away the source.

motters2• 15 years ago

I tend to use GPL for fairly pragmatic reasons. If I've written some software - typically voluntarily and without payment - and put it out there for others to use then I would rather that the code remain in the public domain where improvements can be made which benefit everyone, including the original author.

eps• 15 years ago

Just curious - how many actual improvements were made to your GPL'd software and how many of these in your opinion would have not been made public if the license was different (say, BSD)?

motters2• 15 years ago

It's always difficult to know exactly what people do with the software once it's out there "in the wild". Many of my projects are just curiosities with no other contributors, but a few have had many improvements submitted - some of them quite substantial. My guess is that if the GPL projects used BSD this would not make a big difference, but it might limit the ability to combine my own code with other GPL'd algorithms. The predominance of GPL as a FOSS license means that adopting it basically maximises the potential usefulness of the code, and since IANAL I'm not really qualified to judge compatibility between different sorts of licenses.

jaekwon• 15 years ago

When Stallman says "free software is an ethical imperative, because only free software respects the users' freedom", is he saying that I don't have the freedom to create closed source software for my own benefit? Is he saying that I'm not respecting the end user's freedom by distributing closed source services?

With all due respect Mr Stallman, given those conditions I may not want to code at all.

archangel_one3• 15 years ago

You can't create closed source software for yourself - you have the source code, because you wrote it! But if you distribute that software to someone else, yes he holds that it is morally wrong to deprive them of certain rights, eg. the right to modify it for their own purposes.

Given his apparent stance on non-Free software, I suspect he is not concerned if you choose not to write some. He certainly wouldn't have used it in the first place.

Why Open Source misses the point of Free Software

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