Comment by andrewshadura

2 years ago

No. Open source is the same as free software. It is a marketing term for free software, that defines the same concept in more practical terms. If you actually read the article you linked, you would have known that.

6 comments

andrewshadura

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lucideer  2 years ago

Open source is not the same as free software.

There are broadly two camps: Camp 1 who advocate for free software & free software alone, and Camp 2 who advocate for "open source" being an all-encompassing umbrella term for a few things, including free software. Those in Camp 1 are typically not supportive of the goals of those in Camp 2. Those in Camp 2 do often try and equivocate the two terms.

  • andrewshadura  2 years ago

    No, it really is. Open source is equivalent to free software in everything but definition, and does not include anything that is not free software. There are minor disagreements between different people from the two camps which licenses to accept (e.g. Debian where this definition originated from, does not consider GFDL with invariant sections free, while FSF apparently does).

    It really is the whole point of it, define more clearly what criteria must be fulfilled for software to be considered free software.

dancemethis  2 years ago

It's not, because Free Software handles practical and ethical advantages as an indivisible unit, while open source focus only on promoting practical advantages.

  • andrewshadura  2 years ago

    You are missing the point. The definition of free software focuses on the freedoms of the user, but these freedoms are not easy to verify against a specific software license. The practical aspect of the open source definition (which really is the Debian free software guidelines with the word Debian removed) is that it gives you a toolkit, ten criteria that a licence must fulfil to be considered free software. Importantly, when this definition was created, the alternative, the free software definition, was incomplete and lacked the freedom zero [0]. Even more importantly, that text apparently wasn’t widely known back then, and even Richard Stallman himself liked the DFSG as a definition of free software [1].

    [0]: https://www.gnu.org/bulletins/bull1.txt

    [1]: https://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1129863&cid=268758...