Open source comes of age
Published: 13 Mar 2006 18:10 GMT
...the freedom to do it," says Perens. "The Bazaar model does not just happen to be enabled by the GPL. Richard was certainly thinking about collaboration, and especially incremental development, when he drafted the GPL."
Copyleft is the core of Stallman's philosophy, and an important part of free software, although it isn't a necessary component of a free software licence. The concept remains contentious, not only in the business world, but among developers, many of whom prefer more permissive licences such as the BSD or MIT licences — neither of which supports copyleft.
Stallman and the FSF remain unapologetic about wanting to change the world. Computer users' liberty is at stake; the efficiencies of collaborative software development are just one of the things enabled by that liberty. The political stance makes some uncomfortable, even some of the developers whose projects have benefited most from the free software idea. Linus Torvalds is a good example of the ambivalence many feel toward the politics of free software — he was recently quoted as saying he hasn't always enjoyed the politics associated with the GPL, which covers the Linux operating system kernel. But, at the same time, Torvalds concedes "in the end, I actually think that the GPL simply is the best licence for the kernel."
Another example is David Heinemeier Hansson, who came to attention in 2005 when his programming framework, Ruby on Rails, shot to sudden popularity. Rails developed out of a proprietary project at Hansson's company, 37signals, and uses the permissive, non-copyleft MIT licence (also called the X11 licence). "Rails was born out of the pragmatic needs of a business with a desire to share some and keep some. MIT seems to fit that context better than the GPL," says Hansson. "I wasn't all that interested in trying to force people to contribute back to Rails."
Torvalds' Linux kernel was far from the only high-profile project to adopt a free software licence. Other early examples included the BIND name server, Sendmail mail transport agent, Apache Web server and the Samba networking system; a more recent addition is the Firefox Web browser. Despite wide adoption, however, the business world and the mainstream media remained resistant to the ideological framework underpinning free software, which sounded vaguely anti-capitalist to some.
There was also a problem with the term "free software" itself. The FSF tirelessly explained it meant "free as in 'free speech', not as in 'free beer' ", yet the term could still too easily be confused with freeware, software that was available without paying, but didn't necessarily give you any more liberty.
In 1998, a group of prominent software industry figures decided to do something about these problems by creating a new term, "open source", which would dump what the group called the confrontational attitude of free software, and focus on the pragmatic side of things. The engineering concept of freely available source code was apparently simpler to explain than the GPL's freedoms; according to the Open Source Institute (OSI), usage of the term "open source" shot to popularity in the press within a few weeks, and even became the majority choice in the programming community.
Stallman and the FSF have kept their distance from the term, though Stallman has endorsed "Free/Open Source Software" (FOSS) or "Free/Libre/Open Source Software" (FLOSS).
'Free' vs. 'open source'
The difference between free software and open source software depends on who you're talking to. To many, including Perens, they are just two labels for the same thing. "Open source is how we decided to promote Richard's free software campaign to business people," he says.
If there is any particular distinction, it is that some developers take a strictly pragmatic attitude towards open source, while others — Stallman foremost amongst them — never let it be forgotten that there are moral issues at stake. One example of the...
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