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Free Software vs OSS

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flap:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/27121.html

The tendency on this board to use the term 'Open Source' plenitfully but 'Free Software' only sparingly is indicative of the wider problem - that the 'Open Source' movement has  done harm to the Free Software movement by detracting from the FSF's political/ideological goal by deliberately avoiding/ignoring it.

Fair enough if you agree with the goals of the open source movement rather than the FSF, but I suspect there is a general lack of awareness about the FSF and GNU, not helped by inaccurate statements such as this (from the Linux kernel docs): "Linux is a clone of the operating system Unix, written from scratch by Linus Torvalds"

Calum:
i agree 100% with you. my loyalties lie with the free software foundation and richard stallman, and i agree that the open source initiative has obfuscated the concept of free software.

however neither open source nor free software are either of them very good descriptions of the sort of arrangement that gets released under the gpl and similar licences.

there is yet to be a term which sufficiently describes the "free as in freedom" ethic that these licences embody.

and re: that quote, linux was written from scratch by linus torvalds, however it is a clone of minix and it provides the same function as the unix kernel only. most of the rest of the system is from the free software foundation and its supporters.

you know that and i know that, but it is not as snappy and newcomers are less likely to understand it.

to close, i will just post this, one of my favourite links, and i reckon everybody involved in gnu/linux should definitely read this document at some point:
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/opensources/book/stallman.html

[ September 16, 2002: Message edited by: Calum ]

flap:
You're right that 'free' is an unfortunately ambiguous term. But actually 'Open Source' *is* a good description of what the open source movement advocates; just that - 'open source'. There's no freedom implied and non intended. There are software vendors adopting 'open source' development practises that just involve them making the source available internally within their company.

Linus Torvalds is hailed and revered as the "creator" of the "Linux" operating system, yet his contribution (the kernel) actually comprises only about 3% of the code that makes up the entire GNU/Linux system.
If I'm speaking about GNU/Linux or talking about it here I'll just refer it as 'Linux' as I'm lazy, but if I were writing about it, for example on a website, I'd make the effort to use its full name. I'd urge others here to do the same.

Yes, that's definitely required reading for anyone interested in GNU/Linux. Or if you can't be bothered reading it you can find audio recordings of RMS giving speeches on this at http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/audio/audio.html
I'd recommend http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/audio/audio.html#TOCLinuxTag2000

Calum:
well i frown on the whole open source thing because it is just as proprietary as closed source, but it gives people the wrong idea generally.

to be fair, the free software foundation took a decade to come up with a kernel, and linus knocked one out in his spare time...

flap:
well to be fair they only took so long because they used such a tricky microkernel design; admittedly a bad decision. If only they'd just developed a simple monolithic kernel like Linux we'd probably now be using a system called GNU, and we wouldn't have this situation where Torvalds (whose philosophy is much more in line with the open source movement) gets all the credit for the FSF's work and, more importantly, fails to promote the political/moral side of free software.

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