On Jul 22, 2008, Thomas Cameron <thomas.cameron@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > On Mon, 2008-07-21 at 04:35 -0300, Alexandre Oliva wrote: >> The OSS movement cares about popularity and convenience, so an >> esential part of this movement is to accept, endorse and promote the >> use of software that denies users their freedoms, when that is >> convenient and can lure in more users. > That is complete and utter CRAP. > http://www.opensource.org/docs/osd clearly contradicts that. Indeed, looking only at the definitions, you will miss the context that justifies them and the short summary you objected to. For starters, the definitions are not equivalent, and that's intentional. There are OSS licenses that do not respect the *freedom* to distribute [or not] modified versions of a program, but rather make it an obligation to publish any modifications. But that's not where the largest difference is. The context you're missing by looking only at the definitions (indeed, the OSD is based on the DFSG, in turn based on the FSD) is in messaging and principles. In the Free Software movement, we understand that denying any user of software any of the 4 essential freedoms is unethical, it's an intentional aggression by the party who artificially imposes the restriction. We understand that being denied any of these freedoms brings harm to the victim of this aggression. We understand that accepting such aggressions, and suggesting others to do so, empowers the aggressor, which can then make more victims more easily, harming the entire society. Therefore, non-Free Software is a social problem that needs eradication, and the solution is believed to be education, for users to learn to value their freedoms, understand their social responsibility of rejecting this aggression on themselves and society, even if this requires some sacrifices for the common good, and adopt, developing when needed, only Free Software for their computational needs. This is, give or take a bit, the system of values and beliefs of the Free Software movement. In the Open Source movement, it is understood that the freedoms (that you correctly point out are pretty much the same) are advantageous to promote a cooperative development model, with technical and economic advantages to all parties involved. It is understood that missing these freedoms is inconvenient, but each user gets to compare whatever inconvenience they perceive with whatever benefit they expect to get from the software. Therefore, Closed-Source Software is a pain that we have to learn to live with. It is believed that the vendor of such software is ultimately shooting their own feet, and so it is enough to develop more Open Source software and get more people to use it, even if this involves also using Closed-Source Software. There's a belief that this will have the advantageous effect of diminishing the influence of Closed-Source Software vendors. This is, give or take a bit, the system of values and beliefs of the Open Source movement. Do these sound like reasonable descriptions to you? > Open Source software as defined opensource.org clearly also meets the > requirements of the four freedoms that the FSF espouses. That's why I used the words 'movements', 'values', rather than 'software' or 'licenses'. The fundamental difference between the movements are not in the kind of software they use and develop or the licenses they choose for them, but rather on the motivations for these decisions, as well as the strategies to achieve the goals. -- Alexandre Oliva http://www.lsd.ic.unicamp.br/~oliva/ Free Software Evangelist oliva@{lsd.ic.unicamp.br, gnu.org} FSFLA Board Member ¡Sé Libre! => http://www.fsfla.org/ Red Hat Compiler Engineer aoliva@{redhat.com, gcc.gnu.org} -- fedora-list mailing list fedora-list@xxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list
