[ale] pigs do fly

[Michael B. Trausch]

On Tue, 21 Jul 2009, Tim Watts wrote:

> On Tuesday 21 July 2009 2:36:53 pm Michael B. Trausch wrote:
>> No, I did not misspeak.  "Open source" and "free software" mean two very
>> different things; all free software is open source, but the inverse is not
>> true.  All open source means is that the source is available to someone to
>> at least view; this is why one should say "free software" when that is what
>> they mean, and if necessary additionally qualified with a reference to that
>> definition.  I've heard people use "software libre" to say the same thing,
>> less ambiguiously, which also works.
>
> Agreed: open source and free software are not identical concepts. But I think
> your understanding of the term is not widely accepted. For instance, OSI (and
> I think most of that chunk of the world that gives a rat's ass about this sort
> of thing) understand it to mean something like this:
>
> http://www.opensource.org/docs/osd
>
> So "source available" does not necessarily imply "open source". Additionally,
> open source is usually synonymous with a style of collaborative development
> open to public participation. These waters can get murky enough as it is
> without trying to put MS's "shared source" under the same umbrella.
>
> The fact that MS will license access to some of their source for a hefty price
> does not make it worthy of the term Open Source as it is commonly understood
> -- not nearly so, IMHO.

The term open source can be naturally construed to mean "not closed source," 
and whether we assign attributes of purity to one, the other, or paradoxially 
both is splitting hairs, I think.

Microsoft has three types of licenses:  closed source, proprietary software; 
(limited or restricted) open source, proprietary software, and open source, 
free software.

It is certainly possible to break those categories down further, but in doing 
so we start to draw very fine lines and argue semantics and, at least in 
context, that is a waste of time.  Keep in mind that OSI doesn't disagree 
here; if they did, they would be suing Microsoft itself for violation of their 
trademark, as CodePlex is a service for hosting open source code, which 
includes any license (such as the Singularity license) which is open source, 
yet proprietary.  While CodePlex does not carry the Windows kernel, it is 
still open source; you just have to meet the qualifications (either have lots 
of money, or be an educational institution and apply for it).

While the term "open source" may frequently be used to imply that the source 
can be universally viewed and modified, neither of those has to be true for a 
company to say they are open source.  In the most basic sense of the words as 
they work in English, a company is quite happily to use the phrase "open 
source" to mean "not closed source," which they are happy to define as "closed 
source means we keep the code private".

That said, any member of the community who would be interested in, say, 
helping out the ReactOS project could, in fact, do so and follow the terms of 
the source license given by Microsoft WRT the Windows kernel; they would 
simply have to never actually write code for ReactOS.  They could, however, 
write specs of the Windows kernel source code in plain natural language, which 
they could in turn give to the kernel developers of ReactOS so that they can 
more easily implement their kernel compatibly.  They would just have to have 
the money.

Think of it this way: we as a community consider standards to be open if they 
are published by ISO/IEC.  Yet, those standards (often) cost a pretty penny to 
acquire.  They are not free standards; but they are open.  So, what's the 
difference here?

 	--- Mike