Why Open Source Misses the Point of Free Software
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Re: Why Open Source Misses the Point of Free Software
#2[deleted]
Re: Why Open Source Misses the Point of Free Software
#3This is where people get lost:
> When we call software “free,” we mean that it respects the users' essential freedoms: the freedom to run it, to study and change it, and to redistribute copies with or without changes. This is a matter of freedom, not price, so think of “free speech,” not “free beer.”
Some people will interpret 'user freedom' to mean do what they want with it, and their conclusion is a very permissive license, not what the FSF meant.
It would be better to describe this freedom to the software itself rather than the user of the software, it that it cannot be contained. This is what gives long-term utility to people as a whole.
Re: Why Open Source Misses the Point of Free Software
#4> Tens of millions of people around the world now use free software; the public schools of some regions of India and Spain now teach all students to use the free GNU/Linux operating system. Most of these users, however, have never heard of the ethical reasons for which we developed this system and built the free software community, because nowadays this system and community are more often spoken of as “open source,” attributing them to a different philosophy in which these freedoms are hardly mentioned.
So much of Stallman’s writing gets bogged down in an apparent need to be credited. “GNU/Linux” and “free software” are prevalent examples. At this point it sounds pedantic, as if he cares more about the name (and being acknowledged) than the philosophy. By his own admission, the practical difference is minute. It doesn’t require over three thousand words of rambling.
> In practice, open source stands for criteria a little looser than those of free software. As far as we know, all existing released free software source code would qualify as open source. Nearly all open source software is free software, but there are exceptions.
Ideas are separate from communication, and Stallman does a subpar job on the latter. The Free Software Foundation should consider someone else as its representative. Or at least get him an editor.