Open source comes of age
Published: 13 Mar 2006 18:10 GMT
...distinction is the lists of licences published by the OSI and the FSF: they're both the same licences, but the FSF is careful to recommend the use of the GPL for most software, and to discourage the use of some other licences, including the popular Mozilla Public License.
A widely cited example contrasting the two different positions occurred in 2002, when Torvalds decided to use a proprietary program, BitKeeper, to develop the Linux kernel. The resulting uproar only died away last year, when BitKeeper's vendor started charging open source developers for using the program. While Torvalds saw no problem allowing a proprietary product to take such a key role in the development of such a visible open-source/free software project, Stallman saw things quite differently.
In a commentary published last April, following the withdrawal of BitKeeper, Stallman didn't mince words. "Non-free programs are dangerous to you and to your community. Don't let them get a place in your life," he wrote.
It's nice that many significant programs use free licences, he said, but just as important is the need to keep spreading the word until all software is free: "A better kernel is desirable, to be sure, but not at the expense of weakening the impetus to liberate the rest of the software world."
Such comments have kept Stallman out of the limelight, and since 1998 have helped make "open source" the more acceptable face of free software. More recently, two key issues — software patents and DRM — have begun politicising developers again. To some, Stallman's assertion that the term "open source" obscures the real goal of freedom is starting to make sense.
"For a long time I thought that the distinction between open source and free software was splitting hairs, but... this may be viewed by many as a fundamental distinction in a matter of years," says Florian Mueller, one of the leading campaigners against efforts to legitimise software patents in Europe. He believes version 3 of the GPL, now in development, "will force a number of companies and developers to come clean and show whether they want open source or truly free software".
Software patents
Software patents have become a highly contentious issue in the US, where the patentability of software has been well established since the early 1990s. It has been argued that such patents effectively establish a company's monopoly on an idea, rather than a specific implementation, as copyright does. That means even independent software innovations are subject to the patent. Stallman has compared the effect to composers being allowed to patent musical ideas.
Moreover, critics say that large IT companies such as IBM, HP, Sun and Microsoft are able to use their large arsenals of software patents to lessen the threat of competition from smaller firms.
As Bill Gates put it in a now-famous internal memo of the early 1990s: "If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today's ideas were invented and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complete standstill today.... The solution is patenting as much as we can. A future start-up with no patents of its own will be forced to pay whatever price the giants choose to impose. That price might be high." (As quoted by Fred Warshofsky in The Patent Wars: The Battle to Own the World's Technology. ) Open source is in an even worse position to that of smaller companies, because open source projects generally aren't able to pay any royalties to larger firms.
Large companies generally don't pay royalties on software patents, since they cross-licence amongst themselves, but have recently come under...
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