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Really, ya'll gotta get over your butthurt about the jury's decision | 458 comments | Create New Account
Comments belong to whoever posts them. Please notify us of inappropriate comments.
Really, ya'll gotta get over your butthurt about the jury's decision
Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, September 24 2012 @ 08:03 PM EDT

Weird, isn't it, how the Android marketing doesn't include all the nuance? After all, being "open" just sounds so much better, and is ambiguous enough to get away with it.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Really, ya'll gotta get over your butthurt about the jury's decision
Authored by: Anonymous on Tuesday, September 25 2012 @ 01:05 AM EDT
You are not quite right, free means without cost and there is no requirement to
give up source code - you are donating what you wish to donate. That could
certainly mean just a binary or a blob without any source.

"Open source" depends on the license you use to determine what you
provide to others although it seem most licenses include a public release of
source. Open source would not make much sense if source was not a part of the
offering.

- Archillies

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Not According to Either OSI or FSF
Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, September 26 2012 @ 09:26 AM EDT
Both the Open Source Initiative (OSI) and the Free Software Foundation (FSF) publish a definition for the type of software they each advocate, "open source" and "free software", respectively. In many (some would argue all) cases the definitions overlap. Certainly both the GPLv2 and GPLv3 (copyleft licenses) and one or more of the BSD licenses (non-copyleft licenses) qualify as both open source and free (as in freedom) software.

Let me state that again. GPLv2 is both free software and open source by the respective definitions. The difference between open source software and free software is more a difference in philosophy than actual licenses -- i.e. whether one wishes to speak about freedom or to shy away from it. I will leave it to others who may wish to dredge up some corner cases of licenses that will qualify as one but not the other. But I think it is fair to say that the vast majority of software that qualifies under one definition also qualifies under the other definition.

That said, I clearly align with Richard Stallman's viewpoint in that I would rather speak of freedom than avoid it and I would rather the freedom be guaranteed to those downstream rather than allow free software to be taken non-free. Others disagree and I can (reluctantly) respect that.

(My appologies to Wol, but for reasons of my own I choose to not capitalize free when speaking of free as in freedom software. That is consistent with FSF's usage as a glance at their home page, which I linked to above, shows.)

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

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