Dear Tim -- I attended LinuxWorld last week, and have a question or two about the distinction between Free (as defined by the FSF) and Open (as defined by OSI). I'm told your stand is the opposite of Stallman's.

--Judith

Judith,

First off, I think that Richard thinks I differ from him more than I do.

The basic issue is this:

Some Open Source licenses, such as the Berkeley-style license used by FreeBSD, Apache, the X Window System, and much of the Internet infrastructure software--is truly free. You can do anything you like with it--including building a proprietary derivative that is not free--as long as you acknowledge the copyright of the creator.

Richard's GPL, for which he claims the term "free software", is actually encumbered by a protective copyright, which he calls a copyleft, that prohibits anyone from creating a derivative work that is less free than the original. The GPL is "viral"--that is, if you include any GPL'd software in a work you create, its terms apply to the entire work. This means that people who are doing any form of proprietary software can't use GPL'd software.

Kirk McKusick, one of the leaders of the Berkeley UNIX project in its heyday, puts it something like this: "Copyright is designed to protect the intellectual property rights of the people who create something. Copyleft is designed to protect the rights of the users. The Berkeley license is copy central: Take this stuff down to the copier and make as many copies as you want, for whatever you want."

Richard is happy to support Berkeley-style licenses as free, but he is adamantly opposed to anyone building proprietary derivatives--even the creators of the original software! (For example, he called John Ousterhout, creator of tcl, a parasite, for creating additional tcl tools based on it, which are not free!)

At bottom, Richard believes that the rights of the users of software take precedence over the rights of the creators of that software. He thinks that software should be free, even if its creators don't want it to be. (And so, for example, if you write some piece of software he likes, he thinks it is his right, and perhaps even his obligation, to clone it and make his version free.) I think that the creator of software should be free to put it out under whatever license he or she likes.

But there's a further dimension to this disagreement.

There is a large group of us who just don't see the moral dimension in free software that is so important to Richard. I like to say that Open Source is science, not religion. Making source code freely available is good not because of some inalienable right belonging to the users of software, but because it's good for the creators of the software: giving your software away makes it more useful to you because more people use it; they give you bug reports, they suggest new features, they validate your ideas.

But for me, the choice of proprietary or Open Source software is purely a pragmatic one. I applaud anyone who feels that they want to give their software away in order to enrich what Eric Raymond calls the software "noosphere", but I don't have a problem with people who want to try to go the proprietary route.

It seems to me that the principles of Open Source either work, or they don't. (And my guess is that they work better for some kinds of software than for others.) So I encourage developers to experiment with licenses, to see which ones best achieve their ends.

Ultimately, the question you're asking--the differences between me and Richard (which aren't really the differences between "free software" and "open source") is one of whether free software (or open source, which is a closely related but somewhat more inclusive term) is a moral issue or a scientific one. Do we make software free because we have to, or because we want to? I argue that we want to. The free movement of ideas always trumps restrictions on ideas in terms of innovation and quality. So let Open Source be tested in the marketplace, not in the pulpit!

--Tim

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