Commentary: Open vs Free?
What distinguishes "Open Source" from "Free Software"? Is either a subset of the other?
Resources:
- Open Source Definition
- The Free Software Definition
- Debian Social Contract
- Eric Raymond's The Cathedral and the Bazaar
The following is a somewhat long winded jumble of thoughts.
I think that while both advocate access to source code and the right to alter and redistribute that source code they approach it from very different directions and as a result differ in they're exact implimentations of those ideas.
Free Software is about the moral stance that software should be "free". Proponents believe that Free Software is better for society. It's goal is to provide rights to the end user irregardless of the cost to the developer. Simply by looking at the definition you can see that it's defined completely as rights of end users but doesn't discuss at all methods for providing those rights. It also doesn't give any reasons as to why a purely selfish developer should want to create Free Software.
On the other hand it seems to me that Open Source is more of a project management model that argues that providing some of the freedoms described by Free Software is actually beneficial to the developer. It seems to derive from ideas like those expressed in "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" that Free Software can actually be an effective way to run a project. I think it's no coincidence that the Open Source Definition is derived almost entirely from the Debian Social Contract which is a set of guidelines for the management of the Debian project.
While I would say that in general the rights provided by an Open Source license are probably a subset of the rights provided by Free Software I'm not sure it's strict. For example Open Source requires that the license allow distribution of derived works under the same terms as the original work but Free Software seem to allow additional restrictions to redistribution as long as they don't interfere with the four freedoms.
Edlefma 20:59, 1 Sep 2008 (EST)
