Neary: Rotten to the (Open) Core? [LWN.net]

Neary: Rotten to the (Open) Core?

Posted Jul 20, 2010 0:21 UTC (Tue) by ncm (guest, #165)
Parent article: Neary: Rotten to the (Open) Core?

If "open source" had any objective meaning at all, it would be easier to get worked up about this. They can call themselves an "open source company" all they want, and nobody has any legal basis to complain. They aren't a "Free Software company", and they don't call themselves one, so there's no conflict there. The question is, why pay them any more attention than any other proprietary software shop?

Their paying customers might reasonably feel misled. Surely that's a matter between them and their customers. A company that sets itself up as adversary to its own customers is not long a threat to anyone.

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Neary: Rotten to the (Open) Core?

Posted Jul 20, 2010 0:33 UTC (Tue) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link] (7 responses)

Bit of self contradiction there. There is no legal basis whatsoever for complaining about it if companies called themselves Free software companies. If the community can discourage one, it can discourage the other as well. Why do you believe that "Free software companies" have a objective meaning but not "open source companies" I doubt everyone has a single definition for either in mind. It affects customers, community and companies which genuinely are in the business where free and open source software is key.

Neary: Rotten to the (Open) Core?

Posted Jul 20, 2010 5:13 UTC (Tue) by ncm (guest, #165) [Link] (5 responses)

It doesn't matter. The fact is that they _don't_ call it Free Software, and aren't tempted to call it Free Software. Whatever anybody thinks Free Software is, what they have ain't it, and whatever disagreements people have about Free Software, they don't disagree about that.

Neary: Rotten to the (Open) Core?

Posted Jul 20, 2010 13:29 UTC (Tue) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link] (4 responses)

That's because open source as a term has won over Free software in popularity years back. If Free software had won, we would have similar problems with distortion of names. It is naive to believe otherwise. I would say Free software would easier to distort in several ways.

Neary: Rotten to the (Open) Core?

Posted Jul 20, 2010 14:28 UTC (Tue) by Zack (guest, #37335) [Link] (3 responses)

>If Free software had won, we would have similar problems with distortion of names.

I doubt that. I suspect the often blamed double meaning of the word "Free" would work against that.
Whereas a loosely knit community of many individuals has no problem explaining the two different meanings over and over again to different people (using the speech not beer catch-phrase, which is quite humourous the first time a person hears it, and catches their interest), for a commercial company it would require a real expense to make a differentiation between gratis and libre. What's more is that they need to establish that first and from there on distort the term "Free Software" for their own purposes, but by that time they have already educated their customer, and it would be a lot harder to mislead them.

With the term "Free Software" you cannot skip on explaining why "Free" doesn't mean no cost, especially in a context where you would try to maximise profits by distorting its meaning. But once you explain what it doesn't mean, you can't just leave it dangling there; you'd have to give an explanation what it *does* mean. It's probably possible to distort the meaning there, but all in all the process to distort would be more laborious and error prone and as such less profitable.
The term "open source" is far more monetizeable, which I think is one of the reasons it was adopted quickly, but for the same reason it is unfortunately also more vulnerable to corruption.

Neary: Rotten to the (Open) Core?

Posted Jul 20, 2010 14:32 UTC (Tue) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

We can all continuously second guess history. Companies can give free crippled trialware and call it Free software too and most of the users wouldn't know any better. My opinion is that since open source is the term that got popular, time is better spend protecting it rather than trying to rewrite history.

Neary: Rotten to the (Open) Core?

Posted Jul 21, 2010 5:24 UTC (Wed) by jmalcolm (subscriber, #8876) [Link] (1 responses)

I am not sure why you think companies would corrupt the "Free Software" brand by explaining lots of things. Rather, I would expect them just to run with the common expectation of what "free" would mean from a corporation. That is, they would just say that they have a "free" community version and a commercial "enterprise" version without saying anything about "libre". The corruption would come when companies would offer "free" software for which the source is not available and talk about it as part of the "Free Software" trend. This would significantly dilute the brand of the political movement that is more interested in libre than in no cost. We see this already and "Free Software" is a much less successful brand than "Open Source" outside of the community of people that care about the difference (ie. most of the world).

Neary: Rotten to the (Open) Core?

Posted Jul 21, 2010 11:09 UTC (Wed) by Zack (guest, #37335) [Link]

>I am not sure why you think companies would corrupt the "Free Software" brand by explaining lots of things.

Because without any explanation, "free software" would simply default to software at no cost for most people, as it is today. If a company wanted to co-opt the libre meaning "Free Software" for nefarious purposes, they would have to at least explain how free has two meanings, and that the gratis one isn't the one they refer to by "free".

If a company would put out a shareware version as free software, it would simply mean that, a version of the software at no cost; they wouldn't even be lying.
If they would want to use that to subvert the libre meaning, they would have to position it as "free, but not just as in no-cost", leaving open the question "but then free as in what as well ?"

Please note that I don't think open-source is a term not worth saving or guarding, nor do I suggest it should be dropped wholse-sale in favour of Free Software. I am responding to the statement that the term "free software" would inevitably have suffered from the same problems as the term open-source, and that to believe otherwise amounts to being naive.

Neary: Rotten to the (Open) Core?

Posted Jul 20, 2010 6:03 UTC (Tue) by epa (subscriber, #39769) [Link]

For ages now RMS has promoted a clear meaning for 'free software company' as a company which sells free software and only free software. I suppose the other poster was thinking of that.