19 Feb
2020
19 Feb
'20
3:29 a.m.
IIRC, there was a meeting of various (FOSS) luminaries in the early or
mid-90s discussing rebranding Free Software (as in the FSF definition)
as it was far too easily misinterpreted as meaning
non-/anti-commercial. "Open Systems" had been around forever as a
description of how the Unix "ecosystem" worked - you had a common set
of APIs based on an originally common source base, and a common set of
communication protocols, that worked on a wide array of computer
systems, from real-time to supercomputers to mainframes and beyond.
With all due respect to Clem Cole, I don't recall ever seeing "open
source" used as a description of the Unix "ecosystem" during the 90s.
It was in the air with the (minimal) charges Prentice-Hall charged for
the Minix 0.x and 1.x disks and source; not dissimilar in that sense
to the charges the FSF were charging for their tapes at the time.
But all the Unix-y ads I can recall from the 90s talked about Open
Systems, and never Open Source. That came in following Linux and *BSD
radiation. But this is probably COFF's Harbour stuff ...
Wesley Parish
On 2/19/20, Steve Nickolas <usotsuki(a)buric.co> wrote:
On Tue, 18 Feb 2020, Theodore Y. Ts'o wrote:
On Tue, Feb 18, 2020 at 10:43:06AM -0500, Steve
Nickolas wrote:
I always understood "open source" to mean this: you have access to the
code, you can share it, you can modify it, and any combination of the
above (including commercial exploitation; basically a restatement of
Stallman's freedoms in simpler words).
As any phrase gets skewed to mean something other than it was intended,
when most people say "open source", they seem to only mean what I call
"source-available" - i.e., that there is *some* means by which a mere
mortal can gain access to the source, but there is no guarantee that they
can actually DO anything with the source without getting sued into
oblivion. I usually say if the code doesn't offer the necessary freedom
to make use of it. it's not "open source", it's just source.
(For the record: I shifted from the GNU side to the BSD side of the debate
about 20 years ago. But I hold no ill will toward people on the GNU
side.)
-uso.
On Tue, 18 Feb 2020, arnold(a)skeeve.com wrote:
No, although the differences in practice are small. "Free Software"
was defined by Stallman as meeting his "Four Freedoms". Open
Source(tm) was derived from the Debian Free Software Guidelines, and
while the set of licenses which meet the "Free Software" definition
and those that meet the "Open Source(tm) definition mostly identical,
there are a few exceptions.
I refer folks to the Wikipedia entry for more details:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Free_Software_Definition
It is true that the most of the people who use Open Source instead of
Free Software are doing so mostly for branding reasons (e.g., Open
Source is considered less likely to scare the suits), but technically
they aren't the same. And it is certainly true that way AT&T
distributed ditroff certainly isn't compliant with the Open Source
Definition (OSD).
Whether or not it meets Clem's "open source" (small o, small s),
depends on his definition, which appears to be, "functionally, since
everyone back then had an AT&T source license, we're all good".
- Ted
I don't like your use of "open
source"; it is way out of skew with
how it's used today.
Wasn't it always *intended* to mean the same thing as "Free Software" ?