Proprietary software keeps users helpless (TechRadar)

Posted Jun 15, 2011 0:05 UTC (Wed) by Zack (guest, #37335)
In reply to: Proprietary software keeps users helpless (TechRadar) by butlerm
Parent article: Proprietary software keeps users helpless (TechRadar)

"Never was" might be a little strong, but the GNU project significantly predates the "open source" moniker. It *couldn't* have been open source, and it *couldn't* have build on open source values, because these weren't defined as such yet.
It set out to propagate free software. Later on, when it turned out the software was of better quality, open source was thought up to be a more commercially viable and adaptable term.
So at least until "open source" was coined, the GNU project was not open source. And for some of us, the initial values of the GNU project are more important than the accidental benefits of the software development methodology that are emphasized by "open source".
So GNU being open source is accidental, but it being free software is its purpose. And in that sense GNU never was open source; no more than a car can happen to be coloured red. It undeniably is red, but the colour is not an inherent property of the car.

Proprietary software keeps users helpless (TechRadar)

Posted Jun 15, 2011 1:50 UTC (Wed) by butlerm (subscriber, #13312) [Link]

Okay, but that is a little like saying evolution didn't happen because no one was around to call it that.

Proprietary software keeps users helpless (TechRadar)

Posted Jun 15, 2011 1:53 UTC (Wed) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link] (3 responses)

Dude, your analogies are bizarre.

Like it or not, the GPL fits the the open source definition. You can language lawyer all you want but I don't think that's going to change.

Yes, the FSF came first. And they rocked the world. Then, much later, some dudes wanted something to describe all the excellent L?GPL/BSD/MIT/Apache/etc. licenses (since they're more similar than different) but there was no term for this sort of license. Thus the open source definition was born. I'm sure the authors benefited greatly from the existence of the GPL and learned from it.

Proprietary software keeps users helpless (TechRadar)

Posted Jun 15, 2011 2:21 UTC (Wed) by Zack (guest, #37335) [Link] (1 responses)

>Then, much later, some dudes wanted something to describe all the excellent L?GPL/BSD/MIT/Apache/etc. licenses (since they're more similar than different) but there was no term for this sort of license.

They were called "free software licenses".

>Thus the open source definition was born.

It was born when esr and some other people decided that ethics and the term "free" were complicating things. *Thus* it was born. And it worked well for a while, until it became clear that, the less you have to bother with ethics, the more money you can make. And instead of becoming and easy approachable term for "free software", "open source" became a weaselword and sales term. Fortunately "open source" is slowly returning to its roots, but I doubt this would have happened had there not been some opposition from the "free as in freedom" camp.

Proprietary software keeps users helpless (TechRadar)

Posted Jun 15, 2011 20:36 UTC (Wed) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link]

Sorry, I should have sad, "there was no clear and well-understood term for these licenses."

Proprietary software keeps users helpless (TechRadar)

Posted Jun 16, 2011 19:27 UTC (Thu) by vonbrand (subscriber, #4458) [Link]

Before there was any GNU project or FSF, the BSD folks were freeing the code to their system. The whole TeX system has always been open source, since its beginnings in 1978. I fondly remember the vibrant communities to be found in the Usenet comp.sources.* groups in the early 1980s. DECUS had their yearly meeting where tapes with source were swapped (SIG TAPE), at least since 1975. IBM had their SHARE user's group, which distributed contributed code since around 1955. So yes, open source predates the GNU project by a couple of decades. Sure, RMS came up with a very important concept (copyleft), and rallied a bunch of people around it. But he certainly wasn't the first, and far from the only one, to advocate code sharing.