Wowiee wow wow! So happy to see this!
Red Hat’s new site opensource.com has a brilliant article up entitled “The free software way“.
Written by Richard Fontana, the Open Source Licensing and Patent Counsel at Red Hat, it eloquently hits on a number of my favorite points.
The term “open source” originated in a 1998 marketing campaign by some developers and entrepreneurs to encourage enterprise adoption of what had previously most often been called “free software”. Rebranding was a part of the strategy. I mention this because I think there is a tendency today for some who are less familiar with this history to make too much of the word “open” in “open source”. Certainly it was not intended as a general reference to a principle of information transparency, but rather a recognition that source code availability to users was a necessary condition for software to be “free as in freedom”.
Yes – I am forever hammering this point! And I am pleased to see Mr. Fontana follow up with another of my favorite points:
Necessary, but not sufficient. Indeed, a flaw in the term “open source” is that it seems to place sole emphasis on source code availability per se.
I have often railed against the focus-on-the-source-to-the-exclusion-of-everything-else symptom that some “Open Source” proponents fall into.
What the term “open source” fails to capture is the bundle of legal rights granted to users — broad freedoms to copy, modify, and redistribute — that make open source FaiF.
Yes, indeed! There have been lots of “fauxpen source” efforts to pretend they are Open Source by simply exposing source code. I’m sure the Gentle Reader will be shocked that Microsoft leads the way in “innovating” here: Shared Source, the MS-LPL and MS-LRL licenses, “covenants” not to sue sub-sets of users and so forth.
To me, then, open source is not a development methodology, let alone a distillation of broadly-applicable principles seen as underlying such a methodology. Rather, open source is a specific legal model of property rights transfer. To put it differently, open source is about freedom to use, modify, and share creative material that could otherwise be severely legally restricted by the author. (Source code availability is relevant because otherwise the freedom of modification would be practically impossible to exercise.)
This encapsulates so well the failure of the term “Open Source”: if open source is about freedom, then say it. Call it “Free Software”. At least call it “Free and Open Source” or “FLOSS” or “FOSS” or something that acknowledges that Freedom is what it is really all about.
What a pleasant coincidence to stumble across such a well-written article immediately after reading the chuckleheaded attempts to language lawyer “open source” all over the GNOME Foundation mailing list.
Read the original - there’s more good stuff than just my quotes here, and it’s only a half-dozen short paragraphs or so.
#1 by Michael on January 28, 2010 - 4:02 pm
That is a strange article, it seems to intentionally confuse everyone about the differences of ‘free software’ and ‘open source’.
The reason the term ‘open source’ doesn’t seem to mean anything (and hence is easy to abuse) is that it was conceived for that very purpose. To remove the ‘nasty political stuff’ like worrying about ‘freedom’, in order to directly appeal to big business.
So it really is just a development model, or has certainly come to mean that.
Open source has become synonymous with ‘free labour’. “You get to use this software for free as you wish, and we get to use all your work.” It’s just about technical/legalities of the source code access.
This is in contrast to Free Software which is more about empowering users and developers alike to take control over their digital destiny. Source code access is a necessary part of this, but not the end of it.
The article doesn’t make that distinction, and merely states that they’re the same thing and doesn’t go beyond the legal technicalities (i.e. it describes ‘open source’). It does manage to spell out just how weak ‘open source’ is as a phrase in the English language though.
(as an aside, if you just want to see how useless wikipedia has become, go look up the ‘open source’ article)
#2 by Jason on January 29, 2010 - 6:05 am
Michael,
Thank you for your comments!
I suppose I like the article so much, because it hits on many of the same points I am always droning on about. I won’t re-hash them here, but you certainly hit on the heart of the matter when you say ” … has certainly come to mean that”.
There are certainly interests that want to continue to dilute the term “Open Source” to mean only a development model, and remove any ethical or philosophical strings. The term lends itself especially well to such dilution – having been created with that express purpose!
However, I think the article makes the case quite effectively that Open Source (beyond the term alone now and into the concept, practice, and community), is and must be something more than just a development model.