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On Friday 24 September 2004 8:25 pm, Tony Atkin wrote:
The difference between Open Source and Free Software is PRACTICAL - the fundamental difference is inherently simple: Who controls the future of your work? Under Free Software, if you distribute someone else's work you are required to maintain the freedoms of all users of that work, whether or not you modify the code. Under Open Source, if you distribute someone else's work, you can prevent any user ever seeing the code, including any modifications. This is why there is Open Source code in Microsoft Windows that has been modified but the source code is not available - nor is there any need for Microsoft to do so.I think it would be more accurate to say that Open Source encompasses a wider spectrum of licensing conditions than Free Software.
I disagree. There are plenty of GNU-compatible licences, not just the GPL and probably just as many as 'open source' licences. The difference between the groups is still about what others can do with the code. Variety, in this case, is not good for the harvest.
The crucial difference seems to be that while what we call "Free Software", e.g. GPL, mandates that derivative works maintain the same license as the original,
Not quite. Free software mandates that if you distribute duplicate or modified code, it MUST remain free - the particular licence can be changed. That's an issue for the copyright holders, as long as the conditions of the original licence are still upheld. i.e. as long as it is transferred to another fully compatible free software licence. In practice, getting all copyright holders in a mature project to agree on a different licence is unlikely - the benefits are likely to be marginal at best.
The Open Source Definition merely states that this must be allowed.
Disagree. As it isn't enforced, it may as well not exist - e.g. Microsoft. Some open source licences do not even state that the modified code must remain open source - that's how it ended up in Microsoft code. Note: the key distinction is about DISTRIBUTION. If you modify either type of code for personal use and don't distribute it to others, you can do what you like. Free software exists to protect the interests of future developers. Open source has a place where licence issues make inter-operability difficult, but the real effort (IMHO) should always be directed at solving the underlying licence issue by reverse engineering the interface, not giving away your code so that it may be used against you.
So Open Source compliant licenses may also allow closed source derivatives.
Which is NOT good for the future of your code!! Note that there is nothing stopping a GPL program being simultaneously released under a different licence or even as a closed-source, proprietary, program. Trolltech do this for Qt, also Star Office and OOo. The free software code remains free, even if one of the versions is closed source because all the modifications made in the closed source distribution MUST be released as free software. Compare this with an open source licence that allows closed source modified versions - those modifications are LOST to the open source community because there is no requirement for the closed source distributor to maintain the freedoms that generated the code in the first place! The closed source version can easily be sold as a 'better' version, 'improved', 'added-value' even when no such improvements have taken place - because there is no requirement in the licence for such modifications to be released and no scrutiny of the claims. The choice of licence comes down to the developer. As Robin has recently discovered, omitting the licence is NOT an option. Using a licence that doesn't protect the freedoms that allowed *you to create the code* is unwise. GNU/Linux would not exist if it was only open source. Please consider these issues from the perspective of the users of the future code. The source code is available, fine, both groups provide for this. What happens next? In open source, the majority of licences do not enforce the freedoms that generated the code in the first place. It is simple for second generation users to restrict use of the modified code, remove it from the open source archive and use it to compete against the open source program without so much as a thankyou. Developing code is hard enough without it being stolen. Code is rarely developed in isolation - you use the tools developed by others. Future developers are reliant on still having access to upgraded versions of the tools that you use today. If the freedoms granted by those tools are not defended, there will be no tools for the future. It pays to read Richard Stallman's pages on these issues: http://www.fsf.org/philosophy/free-sw.html http://www.fsf.org/philosophy/free-software-for-freedom.html This is the summary: Relationship between the Free Software movement and Open Source movement The Free Software movement and the Open Source movement are like two political camps within the free software community. Radical groups in the 1960s developed a reputation for factionalism: organizations split because of disagreements on details of strategy, and then treated each other as enemies. Or at least, such is the image people have of them, whether or not it was true. The relationship between the Free Software movement and the Open Source movement is just the opposite of that picture. We disagree on the basic principles, but agree more or less on the practical recommendations. So we can and do work together on many specific projects. We don't think of the Open Source movement as an enemy. The enemy is proprietary software. We are not against the Open Source movement, but we don't want to be lumped in with them. We acknowledge that they have contributed to our community, but we created this community, and we want people to know this. We want people to associate our achievements with our values and our philosophy, not with theirs. We want to be heard, not obscured behind a group with different views. To prevent people from thinking we are part of them, we take pains to avoid using the word ``open'' to describe free software, or its contrary, ``closed'', in talking about non-free software. So please mention the Free Software movement when you talk about the work we have done, and the software we have developed--such as the GNU/Linux operating system. http://www.fsf.org/philosophy/free-software-for-freedom.html#relationship -- Neil Williams ============= http://www.codehelp.co.uk/ http://www.dclug.org.uk/ http://www.isbn.org.uk/ http://sourceforge.net/projects/isbnsearch/ http://www.biglumber.com/x/web?qs=0x8801094A28BCB3E3
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