Free Software Movement versus Open Source Movement

Discussion

Maarten Vanheuverswyn:

"There are two major philosophies concerning the creation and use of freely available software, known as the free software and open source models. The term "free software" is older than "open source". "Free software" is used by the Free Software Foundation founded by Richard Stallman in 1985. The term "open source", on the other hand, has been developed by Eric Raymond and others, who, in 1998, founded the Open Source Initiative.

Why is there a distinction and why is it important? In order to tackle these questions, we have to take a look at the history of the free software movement.

The free software movement fractured in the late nineties into two camps: the free software movement proper and the open source movement. The tensions had existed for a long time beforehand and centre on the difference in philosophy between the advocates of each movement.

On the one hand, the free software camp tended to proceed from ethical or moral arguments about the harmful effects of proprietary software. This, coupled with the GNU Public Licence which was perceived as being unfriendly to business (and often said to be anti-commercial), prompted the creation of the open source camp. The latter sought to win the support of big business and so emphasized the technical superiority of the software resulting from the "open" development process.

This contradiction has been there from the beginning. Richard Stallman, founder of the free software movement had ensured that the licence that granted end user freedoms could not be used by business to undermine the original effort. One right that is not granted by the original GPL free software licence was to incorporate free software into commercial products. If a company does this it must make its own product also free software, which explains Steve Ballmer's "virus" remark.

The open source advocates pursued a strategy of winning support from big business and were successful in getting large corporations like IBM to back them. The free software community had shown how amateurs organised into loose teams across the globe can outperform even the disciplined legions of developers employed by Microsoft. The open source community sought to exploit this process but to remove the anti-capitalist ethos that seemed to bedevil free software. This led to the creation of several successful not-for-profit foundations such as Apache that can pay developers to work on open source. Unsurprisingly, the free software movement has found itself pushed to the periphery as its moral crusade failed to resonate with many people.

The true significance of the free software model is a political one. Thousands of computer programmers all over the world work together on a common project and they share their computer code in order to arrive at a good product that everybody is able to use. It shows in practice that even in this capitalist world it is possible to collaborate rather than be in competition with each other. It shows that it is a myth that people will only do things for money or for profit.

Having said that, it would be wrong to idealise the open source or free software model. What we see now is only a tiny fraction of its potential." (http://www.marxist.com/computer-industry-capitalism-free-software240907.htm)

Comment

Patrick Anderson:

This article claims the GNU GPL cannot be used in "Commercial Products" when it says:

One right that is not granted by the original GPL free software licence was to incorporate free software into commercial products.

This seems to imply the GNU GPL disallows commerce (the selling of) that software which is definitely not true as explained at http://GNU.org/philosophy/selling.html which reads:

Many people believe that the spirit of the GNU Project is that you should not charge money for distributing copies of software, or that you should charge as little as possible — just enough to cover the cost. This is a misunderstanding.

Actually, we encourage people who redistribute free software to charge as much as they wish or can. If this seems surprising to you, please read on.