I like to say that in Lisp terms, open source and free software are EQUAL? but not EQ?. That is to say, they refer to the same thing structurally but arrived at it via different means.
Indeed, open source is pretty much just marketing gloss over free software. Eric Raymond, the popularizer of the term open source, is remarkably similar to Stallman in terms of his ethical perspective on the matter: he feels that proprietary software is just plain wrong and that conditions under which proprietary software are abusive to end users and developers alike. But it was useless to try and sell that to businesses, so the OSI focused on the pragmatic (read: bottom-line) benefits of open source software in order to get businesses on board.
I'm not sure yet which is the better hack: RMS turning copyright on its head to ccreate copyleft and the GPL, or the OSI turning marketroid cant on its head to make free software buzzword-compliant. Both of these are culture-jamming of a scale and potency that Shepard Fairey can only dream of.
#2 is misleading. Of course the FSF endorses the GPL and copyleft, but there's plenty of other free software licenses, most of them GPL-compatible, such as most of the BSD licenses.
Then for copyleft purists who insist on having specific redistribution agreements, there's plenty of alternatives there too.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 18.6 ms ] threadIndeed, open source is pretty much just marketing gloss over free software. Eric Raymond, the popularizer of the term open source, is remarkably similar to Stallman in terms of his ethical perspective on the matter: he feels that proprietary software is just plain wrong and that conditions under which proprietary software are abusive to end users and developers alike. But it was useless to try and sell that to businesses, so the OSI focused on the pragmatic (read: bottom-line) benefits of open source software in order to get businesses on board.
I'm not sure yet which is the better hack: RMS turning copyright on its head to ccreate copyleft and the GPL, or the OSI turning marketroid cant on its head to make free software buzzword-compliant. Both of these are culture-jamming of a scale and potency that Shepard Fairey can only dream of.
Then for copyleft purists who insist on having specific redistribution agreements, there's plenty of alternatives there too.
As for me, I'll stick to the WTFPL.