[btilly]

Doesn't the open source movement overlap quite heavily with the ideals of free software?

Not really.

Open source can be described as a marketing campaign to convince people who don't care about free software to produce/accept it. The catch is that the people who are most attracted to that marketing campaign are attracted precisely because they do not care about free software ideals. Even worse, when you're motivated by something fundamentally different than the GNU manifesto, your actions will not always fit that manifesto.

An example of the difference is the use of permissive licenses. Someone who is into open source will often like permissive licenses because they let them reuse open source code in proprietary code. A free software supporter, by contrast, will avoid permissive licenses for the same reason.

[Jare]

> Open source can be described as a marketing campaign to convince people who don't care about free software to produce/accept it

On the other hand, Free Software can be described as an attempt by certain fanatics to hijack the idea of open source code sharing, in order to advance their own ideals.

[dlitz]

Yeah, but that's not what actually happened. "Free software" and "open source" are terms whose etymologies are fairly well documented, and many of us remember when and why they were coined. The term, "open source" in particular (as applied to software) was coined in 1998 to market free software to the types of businesspeople who equated "free" with "cheap, crappy, etc".

There's a documentary on YouTube that does a reasonably good job of telling the story of how and why this happened, including the conflicts between the various factions: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CjaC8Pq9-V0

[btilly]

I think that my characterization is significantly less controversial. For instance Bruce Perens (original author of the open source definition) says that the open source definition was ...conceived as a program to market the free software concept to people who wore ties.

On the other hand your characterization strikes at the heart of the BSD vs GPL argument as it is viewed by BSD proponents.

[Jare]

Exactly, I'm leaning more towards Eric S. Raymond's developer-centric views, which may not be canonically Open Source but do speak a lot more to me and my personal history pre-1998. But this hopefully answers the question by the gp about why there is room for more than two (and three) 'movements': to promote different aspects of software availability.

[disgruntledphd2]

Sure, you could frame it that. However, the historical timeline of both of those terms (in that FS was coined long before OS) would suggest that your interpretation may not be the best one.

That being said, I am certainly aware of the many, many practical difficulties with the GPL, but that doesn't stop it being one of the best (IMO, of course) events in software in the last thirty years.

[rhizome]

Not only that, but nobody ever addresses the perhaps-strawmanned assertion that what the GPL does should be easy. That is, why the practical difficulties of the GPL constitute a negative, i.e. the "bug vs. feature" argument.