[OT] What is Open Source? (was Re: ANN: Twisted 0.16.0...)

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

>>>>> "Huaiyu" == Huaiyu Zhu <huaiyu at gauss.almadan.ibm.com> writes:

    Huaiyu> Whether they have changed the definition [of free
    Huaiyu> software] in recent years, or whether I have misunderstood
    Huaiyu> this issue from the beginning, I don't know.

You have misunderstood from the beginning.

rms's fundamental position is radical: property rights in software are
morally wrong.  Unfortunately, even rms himself seems incapable of
behaving in a way consonant with this belief.  (Ie, he clearly
believes that he has a special right to manage development of projects
he has initiated, such as Emacs, gcc, or glibc.  I imagine he would
clarify as the EU does, by distinguishing an author or maintainer's
_moral_ rights in a work from _economic_ rights, but I've never seen
him comment on precisely that issue.)  It's clearly a political
non-starter, too: more than most people, programmers tend to resist
alienating their rights in their work.  This is not surprising, given
that they _can_ have it and give it away, too.

For these reasons, rms's explanations of free software itself tend to
bounce off the minds of most people, and they get warped into
something else more familiar.

Developers tend to get quite confused.  They recognize that in the
real world, they are grateful for the use of lots of wonderful free
software, but on the other hand reaching high levels of quality in
their own projects requires resources that seem (and often are)
impossible to assemble without proprietary licensing.  rms is not
sympathetic; he feels developers are morally required to develop
alternative sources of revenue (cf. The GNU Manifesto for some
models).

    Huaiyu> So now my mental picture is 

    Huaiyu>    (copyleft) is subset of (free) is subset of (open source)

The second is not a proper inclusion.

The first is a proper inclusion.

[Aside: One of the litmus tests for membership in the "free software
movement" as opposed to the "open software movement" is preference for
copyleft over other forms of free software.  Both that and Bill
Gates's fear of the GPL are somewhat ironic, given that GPL is the
most anti-competitive of the common free software licenses.]


-- 
Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences     http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp
University of Tsukuba                    Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN
              Don't ask how you can "do" free software business;
              ask what your business can "do for" free software.