[candeira]

Thanks for changing your mind on receiving new information.

DFSG and the OSD are essentially the same thing, having been written both of them by Bruce Perens. Main difference is that Debian doesn't certify licenses: they ship software, so they look at the whole packages, so to speak. OSI only certify licenses, they don't ship software.

As to what the DFSG and OSD do that the FSF four principles don't, I think they are more detailed set of rules one can apply when trying to figure out whether some software is free or not. IMHO, the FSF principles are less operationally useful, despite describing categorically the same set of software.

[cyphar]

> DFSG and the OSD are essentially the same thing, having been written both of them by Bruce Perens.

Right, and I knew this is what you were getting at. I guess my main point is that having a working guideline for acceptable licenses for a distribution makes complete sense (after all of the moral viewpoints have been debated to death you have to ship some code eventually), but using those guidelines as the basis of a movement doesn't really (at least not as much as basing a movement on an a set of ethical axioms). So I would say I favour the DFSG over the OSD purely because of what it is used for and represents, rather than because of the (almost non-existent) differences between the two texts.

But of course, I'm biased since I'm far more in the "free software" camp than I am in the "open source" camp -- purely because I think bringing it back to discussions of ethics is quite important (perhaps more than ever).