Comment by Apocryphon
11 years ago
Perhaps there should be a phrase to mean "open source in name only." I wonder if all of this is related to Richard Stallman's dismissal of projects that claim to be open source, saying that it isn't enough unless it's "free software."
RMS is satisfied with anything that has a GPL licence. He's always supported creators rights to manage projects however they choose, and sell software as they choose. Google would fall short simply because the BSD licence isn't copyleft, but not for much of what they're being accused of here...
Not true, rms has no problem with the BSD license. It's still Free Software, and rms has even supported licensing a particular piece of software (Ogg/Vorbis) under a permissive license instead of the GPL.
http://lwn.net/2001/0301/a/rms-ov-license.php3
You are perfectly right regarding stallmas posted opinion regarding the GPL license.
I doubt however that RMS would be happy with open/free code being replaced by closed one as exemplified in the article. That has of course nothing to do with permissive and copyleft, and all to do with lock-in, proprietary practices, and project management.
He'd likely just say it was never fully free to begin with, because of the license. Not to mention, all the Google apps in question connect to SaaS backends which are closed anyway.
Personally, I don't see the problem with what Google is doing, I would prefer 100% open software myself, but Google would never open-source their services' code, so the fact the apps are closed-source doesn't really make a difference.