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From: Rich Freeman <rich0@gentoo.org>
Date: Wed, 21 Dec 2016 14:31:24 -0500
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On Wed, Dec 21, 2016 at 1:56 PM, Heiko Baums <lists@baums-on-web.de> wrote:
>
> And this again. You know the difference between OpenSource and ClosedSource?
>
> You pay for ClosedSource. For OpenSource you don't need to pay. But I
> have neither time nor energy to explain you the philosophy (before
> Poetterix) of OpenSource.
OpenSource has nothing to do with whether something costs money. Not
even RMS or ESR would agree with "For OpenSource you don't need to
pay."
For starters, all software costs somebody something. It might be
offered for free TO YOU, but somebody spent a lot of time and effort
making it, and somebody may or may not have been compensated to do it.
Here is a decent overview from the FSF's perspective, though they're
more focused on free software than open source:
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html
Here is their take on free software vs open source:
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-software-for-freedom.html
Now, if you asked ESR for his take he'd have a different perspective,
though he'd agree with the FSF that neither has anything to do with
whether you have to pay for it, and he would agree on the
differentiation between OSS and FOSS.
Some off the cuff definitions:
Open Source: generally means the author makes the source code
available. OSI has their take on it which most people accept:
https://opensource.org/osd
Free Software: licensed in a manner that guarantees the FSF's four
freedoms. https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html
In general all free software is open source, but not all open source
software is free software.
Either can be free as in beer or not. It is completely legal for me
to download a Debian DVD, make some changes to it, put a copy of the
source code on the DVD, and offer to sell it to you for $5000 licensed
under its original licenses. The only thing I can't do is prevent you
from sticking an image of that DVD on your website after you buy it so
that nobody else has to buy it from me. In practice a lot of it tends
to be free as in beer because FOSS licenses make it impossible to
prevent somebody from offering it free of charge, and people tend not
to pay for something when they can get the same thing for free.
However, companies like Red Hat can and do charge for their distros
all the same, usually offering things like support to entice people to
pay. When you buy RHEL you're buying the software and not just the
support, even if you could get most of it for free without paying for
it.
> But I can tell you this much. OpenSource and
> its developers usually have no commercial intentions.
This is true of some open source software. I'm not convinced it is
even true for most of it.
Half of the companies that contribute to Linux are for-profit entities
that have a profit motive behind their contributions. Some of the
most popular Linux distros like Ubuntu and RHEL are for-profit
enterprises. A few major projects are backed by foundations, but IMO
some of them are really only non-profit in the sense that they don't
pay dividends to anybody (heck, the US National Football League is
non-profit by that definition); some of them have small armies of
executives and administrative staff like any other large corporation.
Quite a bit of FOSS isn't developed by organizations like Gentoo which
are community based with low amounts of money going around.
A lot of FOSS is also failed commercial software, or parallel
community versions to commercial software (think Fedora/CentOS, or the
old MySQL model).
And there is nothing wrong with any of this. It is just free
software. At worst you can just ignore it. At best you can adapt it
to your own needs, or just use it as-is if it fits your needs. We
aren't worse off because somebody made it available to us. I might
never use RHEL, but the fact that it is out there doesn't hurt me.
Maybe the fact that RHEL is actually paying developers means that
fewer of them have free time to donate (assuming that you don't care
for the stuff RedHat does contribute), but who am I to begrudge
somebody the right to make a living? Programmers don't have to be
starving artists to claim some kind of moral superiority.
Personally I prefer to work in a community-based environment, which is
why I'm here and not running Debian (well, that's just one reason, I
also prefer the Gentoo approach in general and have used Gentoo since
long before openrc even existed, let alone systemd). Ultimately
though we're just a small part of a much larger ecosystem. There are
things about that ecosystem that I like more, and things that I like
less. However, if we allow developers the freedom to create what they
want to create then we're going to need to deal with the reality that
sometimes they won't want to create the things we want them to.
--
Rich