h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

"Everyone involved is driven by a belief that what they're doing is for the good of all, and so any contribution is offered freely and without thoughts for monetary gain"

Actually, that describes 'free software', not open source. Open source believes that better, more efficient software is created by revealing the source code. It's free software advocates that believe such code-sharing benefits humankind.

The term "free Software" is often used to describe "open source" projects.
I actually think it's quite a good description when accompanied by the line "that's free as in 'speech', not 'beer'".

Erm, no it's not.

Open Source, which is a far younger movement, is a term created to describe projects that have their source code on view, and freely alterable. It happens to describe many projects that are free software, and vice versa, but comes to the debate from a position of pragmatism rather than politics. The reason the term was created was to distinguish the supposedly businesslike behaviour of the Open Source movement with the more impassioned behaviour of the Free Software movement.

Which is not to say the two movements don't overlap and get on very well, but the quotation I was talking about is simply incorrect.

Right. It should be pointed out that free software or "freeware" is not always open source. You can download lots of stuff for free, like Quicktime or Windows Media Player, but Apple and Microsoft would not release the source code for either of those products.

Oh no! Now everything's getting really complicated. You can always get source code for Free Software (with capitals) if not for all free software. That's one of the points of Free Software.

Basically, the point is that open source software doesn't have to be free (example: Lycoris Linux); and also, free software doesn't have to be open source (example as stated above: Quicktime).

Erm. Open Source software doesn't have to be free in that you can pay for it, just as you can pay for anything free, but to be open source software it has to be freely redistributable (at least in source form). The reason you /have/ to pay for Lycoris is that it has proprietary parts as well as Open Source parts.

And Free Software (with capitals) does have to be open source. Quicktime isn't Free Software, though it is free and it is software.

What a wonderfully confused discussion. Perhaps it would be useful if I give a complete list of definitions for all the different kinds of software that is free in various ways:

"freeware": software which costs nothing, and has no strings attached to do with cost. "Free as in beer".
- e.g. Adobe Acrobat Reader; many small personal projects such as games or simple utilities.

"shareware", "nagware", and various other variants: software which costs nothing, but tries to get you to buy a version that does; this may include missing features out of the free version or even causing it to cease functioning after a set period/amount of use. Again, "free as in beer", but with even less freedom.
- e.g. Winzip; recent versions of RealPlayer and WinAmp.

"Free Software": a concept created by Richard Stallman and the GNU project to represent the idea that the development of computer software should be treated in the same way as traditional scientific research and developed "for the good of all". It should be available "free as in beer", but more importantly it should be "free as in freedom" - the freedom to run, study, redistribute and improve it in any way you see fit. There is nothing wrong with charging money for "Free Software", but it should also be available for no money, as should anything you add to it. True Free Software is "Copylefted" - it uses copyright law to make it a breach of licence to make a derivative which is not also copyleft, and therefore Free.
- e.g. anything licensed under the GPL, including Linux and the many GNU tools that make it usable.

"Open Source Software" (also "shared source"): a looser term, created by a group of software developers who saw many advantages in the collabourative development which arises from sharing the source code to a program, but who lacked the philosophical conviction of the original "Free Software" movement. The aim of the Open Source movement was to make the sharing of source code appeal more to commercial concerns - arguing, as Smiley Ben says, from a position of pragmatism rather than politics. Software may be open source without being copylefted, and even without providing the freedoms espoused by the originators of Free Software (although there is an official "Open Source Definition" which preserves some of them).
- e.g. BSD, the original Qt license (I'm struggling here a bit, because I don't want to get my licenses in a muddle, but I think those are both considered OS but non-Free)

All these terms get muddled up and made to overlap in general usage, and all could be considered "free software" in the sense of "software that is free", but these are their strictly correct meanings. For the Free Software Foundation's definitions, see http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/categories.html

[IMSoP]

Thanks· Clears things up.

(Note that whilst Open Source is known as 'shared source', Microsoft's 'Shared Souce' is neither Free Software nor Open Source, more a 'look but don't touch, and only small portions at that' licence...

Yes, I probably shouldn't have lumped those two together like that - I'm not entirely sure who uses Shared Source and when; maybe I can find a definitive description or two (from the OSI and/or the FSF, for instance).

The only place I have come across the term "shared source" is the microsoft shared source initiative.

It is actually much worse than it has been made out here, because as an open source or free software developer, you have to make sure that you can never see any of it.

This is because of the included "non-disclosure" agreement which means that if you happen to include a feature which has a standard way of implimenting it, and you could have seen it in the microsoft source code, they will use that as an excuse to try and sue your project out of existence.

Not a nice thing to get involved with. Allowing your boss to sign you up to this basically means agreeing to never develop free or open source software between seeing the code, and microsoft going bust, so if you harbour any dreams or aspirations of ever contributing, refuse to look at the code.

Also, because they will only show you part of the code, which they have selected, it is meaningless as a security audit, and because they only fix things in the next version of windows, there is little point in reporting any faults you do find. especially as they are still wedded to their discredited "security through obscurity" policy.

ah, yes, you're quite right: "Shared Source" is code that you can see, but not use. So, you can examine specific parts of Microsoft's code, but only under select circumstances and with notsomuch strings attached as a web of steel cables.

I don't know if they use the same term for their non-disclosure agreements with universities, etc. but that doesn't seem to be an intrinsic part of their meaning. The main thing seems to be that you can't actually copy the code into anything else; ever; even by mistake - the code is available as a kind of reference only. I'm taking this from this FAQ about "DotGNU" and something called "Rotor": http://www.southern-storm.com.au/pnet_faq.html#q11_3 which seems to refer to the license at http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdn-files/027/001/901/ShSourceCLIbetaLicense.htm


Also, I've found the FSF's list of licenses, which is very comprehensive and states their reasoned opinion on the status of each:
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/license-list.html
(although, somewhat surprisingly, it doesn't mention Creative Commons at all; http://www.gnu.org/licenses/licenses.html does though)

Oh, and I think I implied somewhere (or was it in a different thread?) that software couldn't truly be Free if it wasn't Copyleft - I stand corrected, the FSF treats Copyleft as a subset of Free.

hmm, sorry, bit of a mish-mash of a post this. ah, well...
[IMSoP]

I am not surprised that they don't mention creative commons yet.

They have a gpl type license for documentation, and the creative commons license, while comming from a similar background is fairly recent. The fsf website can be a trifle glacial in their update speeds.

They also have some funny ttitudes to "free software", and while they accept the definition of other more lightweight licenses, they really want stuff to have the most rights kept open as possible, which shows in their somewhat grudging aceptence of the bsd licence which while free, doesn't guarentee the continued freedom of the software due to the lack of the following two requirements:

1, the need to contribute modifications back to the source project. Not having this allowed microsoft to harvest the networking code into windows, but keep any improvements for themselves. this would not have happened under the gpl.

2, The requirements to share the source code of any licensed code. This means that microsoft not only didn't have to pass on the code they got from bsd, but they actually hid the fact that they had got it in the first place.