> According to the Open Source Initiative's definition, that is NOT > open source. It is not their fault that people stretch the term.
To this, I shall add that the standard meaning of "open source" (that supported by OSI) is recognized by a huge number of organizations, as well as government agencies. This is on top of it being generally well known. The difference between Free Software and Open Source in terms of software categories are even smaller than those outlined by: > https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.html The article used to confuse Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code. This was corrected. What was NOT corrected is the confusion between Visual Studio Code and Code - OSS: - Visual Studio is a proprietary IDE by Microsoft. - Code - OSS is both Free Software and Open Source, published under the Expat license. It is a text editor which supports extensions (becoming effectively an IDE, but unrelated with Visual Studio). - Visual Studio Code has nothing in common with Visual Studio, other than the name (this is the mistake that was corrected). Visual Studio Code is provided only in binary form. It is not Free Software nor Open Source. However, it is known that most of its codebase is the same as that of Code - OSS (or at least that's what they claim: https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/60#issuecomment-161792005). The error on the GNU website is claiming Visual Studio Code is Open Source. It is not and Microsoft doesn't claim it is: instead, it describes it as "*built* on open source". The confusion stems from the fact that the repo for Code - OSS is called "vscode". But they clarify that distinction in the repo. In addition, OSI doesn't seem to have any stance on whether any executable at all qualifies as open source, as they only use the term to refer to source code. It's not really an explicit disagreement with the FSF, just a narrower scope. Debian uses the same definition of "Free Software" that OSI uses for "open source". Despite this, Debian is more conservative than the FSF on what counts as Free Software. I'd argue that if any difference at alle exists between the two software categories, it is due to slight differences of interpretation, and not to the actual text of either definition. But, more likely, there is no such difference at all and different communities disagree on those licenses that sit on the very boundary of that one category. Boundary which will always exist and always be blurred, as is the boundary of almost any other class humans define. Obviously the free software movement and the open source movement are two different movements, based on different principles. And it makes sense for the FSF to both disagree with and criticize the open source movement. But when it comes to differentiating software categories, almost every time I see someone draw a distinction (obviously people like you, RMS, are an exception to this) do so based on one of the following errors: - Defining "open source" as software of which the source is available, regardless of licensing (should be called "source available"). - Defining "free software" as software which is free of charge. - Defining "free software" as software under copyleft FLOSS licenses and "open source" as software under lax permissive FLOSS licenses (does not require using the word "copyleft"). - Defining "free software" as "software under the GPL". I've seen the last two misconceptions from people that appeared to strongly support (rather, they believe they supported, but actually misunderstood) the free software movement, often as a way to bash the open source movement and, in some cases, claiming that licenses such as the Expat license would never qualify as free. I believe that when it comes to describing software or licenses (and not movements!) "free software" and "open source" should be used as exact synonyms in almost every context (which is compatible with always choosing to pick the former), while recognizing that a few licenses and programs lie in the boundary of that category, and that they are luckily a small (and probably ever shrinking) minority. _______________________________________________ libreplanet-discuss mailing list [email protected] https://lists.libreplanet.org/mailman/listinfo/libreplanet-discuss
