Free software only

Posted Apr 2, 2003 16:11 UTC (Wed) by cwong15 (guest, #3013)
In reply to: Free software only by JoeBuck
Parent article: Open Source needs centralized PR, not development (NewsForge)

No, "free software" (a misleading term, IMHO) and open source is not equivalent, and there are significant cases where they differ. The Perens open source definition has the patches clause: an author may restrict modification of the original if patches can be distributed with the original. This results in a number of open-source-but-not-Stallman-free cases, many significant. The old QPL for Qt, for example, was one that was open source but not Stallman-free. Pine is another example, as are Dan Bernstein's qmail and djbdns.

Another notable app that would not be listed by FSF not considered open source is Aladdin Ghostscript.

These examples are notable. There is no other text email app comparable in polish, user-friendliness and features as Pine. Until Postfix, there was nothing as secure as Qmail, certainly not security-hole-of-the-week Sendmail. And this goes too for djbdns: Bind security holes are serious problems for the whole Internet. Finally, Linux printing would be in the stone age: without Aladdin Ghostscript, we would not have the trickled-down GNU Ghostscript.

to post comments

what's your point?

Posted Apr 3, 2003 10:25 UTC (Thu) by coriordan (guest, #7544) [Link]

I don't understand your post, you seem to state and argument in the
first line but then go on to back it up with completely irrelevent
data.

> "free software" [...] and open source is not equivalent

Nobody said they were were equivalent, who are you talking to?

I said that 99.6% of software that can be classed as "OpenSource" also
meets the criteria of "Free Software".

> The old QPL for Qt, for example

Hey great example! A bunch of people that decided to make up their own
license, tried to place silly restrictions on distriutors, and decided to GPL.

...and then you go on to talk about your favourite console based mail
client, yet-another-mta, a company that releases free software and a
non-scalable dns?

Ciaran O'Riordan

Corrections

Posted Apr 3, 2003 17:31 UTC (Thu) by dthurston (guest, #4603) [Link]

> The Perens open source definition has the patches clause: an author may
> restrict modification of the original if patches can be distributed with
> the original.

While Stallman's definition of "Free Software" is a little vaguer than the OSD (or DFSG), it's clear that some forms of the "patches" clause are acceptable to him. For instance, TeX, one of the earliest pieces of free software (and accepted as such by the FSF), has such a clause.

> The old QPL for Qt, for example, was one that was open source but not
> Stallman-free.

At http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html , the QPL version 1.0 is listed as a non-copyleft free software license which is incompatible with the GPL.

> Another notable app that would not be listed by FSF not considered open
> source is Aladdin Ghostscript.

I would be very surprised if Aladdin Ghostscript were considered "open source", since the license explicitly prohibits commercial distribution, which is point 1 ("Free Redistribution") of the OSD. The license is not on the list of OSI approvsed licenses at http://www.opensource.org/licenses/ .

(For those following at home, note the distinction between Aladdin Ghostscript and GNU Ghostscript: GNU Ghostscript is published under the GPL, but is a few versions older.)

I am still very curious to see any significant difference between the terms "open source" and "free software" applied to particular licenses.

> There is no other text email app comparable in polish, user-friendliness
> and features as Pine. Until Postfix, there was nothing as secure as
> Qmail, certainly not security-hole-of-the-week Sendmail. And this goes
> too for djbdns ...

I'm very confused, since you yourself pointed out that none of these are "open source" nor "free software". In fact, the restrictions on all of these programs cause significant problems for distributors in practice.

(I also disagree with your assessment of the utility of the alternatives, but that is beside the point.)