Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by Jare 4932 days ago
> 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.
3 comments
dlitz 4932 days ago
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

link
btilly 4932 days ago
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.

link
Jare 4932 days ago
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.
link
disgruntledphd2 4932 days ago
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.

link
rhizome 4932 days ago
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.
link