I think it's a question of emphasis and advocacy. Stallman himself points out that in most instances free software and OS software are identical, but one promotes a social movement while the other simple advocates a design methodology. Many developers just aren't overly concerned with the distinctions--they have no compelling reason to sign on to Stallman's philosophy, but they also have no desire to write proprietary code. They have some hopes that exposing it will improve it. In some instances, this proves to be true.
It's notable that the article itself was published under Creative Commons, which is designed to recognize intellectual property and extend but not challenge copyright laws, rather than under a free software license. At a minimum, that reveals how confusion abounds about the exact nature of the various licenses, and how they are often treated as interchangeable. A recent essay in the Proceedings of the Association for Computing Machinery noted that there are issues of design methodology in both free and OS licensed software. To many end users, these problems are what matters--not whether the software identifies with a social movement. --- Paul On Mon, Dec 20, 2010 at 7:11 AM, James Morris <[email protected]> wrote: > I find it curious that the OSI choose to play down the importance of freedom? > > > On 20 December 2010 10:58, Rob Myers <[email protected]> wrote: >> http://mako.cc/writing/hill-when_free_software_isnt_better.html >> >> "For open source, poor-quality software is a problem to be explained >> away or a reason to eschew the software altogether. For free software, >> it is a problem to be worked through. For free software advocates, >> glitches and missing features are never a source of shame. Any piece of >> free software that respects users' freedom has a strong inherent >> advantage over a proprietary competitor that does not. Even if it has >> other issues, free software always has freedom. >> >> [...] >> >> A second, perhaps even more damning, fact is that the collaborative, >> distributed, peer-review development process at the heart of the >> definition of open source bears little resemblance to the practice of >> software development in the vast majority of projects under free (or >> "open source") licenses." >> _______________________________________________ >> NetBehaviour mailing list >> [email protected] >> http://www.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour >> > > > > -- > _ > : http://jwm-art.net/ > -audio/image/text/code/ > _______________________________________________ > NetBehaviour mailing list > [email protected] > http://www.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour > -- ----- |(*,+,#,=)(#,=,*,+)(=,#,+,*)(+,*,=,#)| --- http://ignotus.com _______________________________________________ NetBehaviour mailing list [email protected] http://www.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour
