WhEn WE Call software “free,” we mean it respects the users’ essential freedoms: the freedom to run it, to study
and change it, and to redistribute copies with or without changes (see http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free- sw.html). This is a matter of freedom, not price, so think of “free speech,” not “free beer.”
These freedoms are vitally important. They are essential, not just for the individual users’ sake, but because they promote social solidarity—that is, sharing and cooperation. They become even
more important as more aspects of our culture and life activities are digitized. In a world of digital sounds, images, and words, free software increasingly equates with freedom in general.
Tens of millions of people around the world now use free software; the schools in regions of India and Spain now teach all students to use the free GNU/Linux operating system (see http://www.gnu.org/gnu/linux-and- gnu.html). But most of these users have never heard of the ethical reasons for which we developed this system and built the free software community, because today this system and community are more often described as “open source,” and attributed to a different philosophy in which these freedoms are hardly mentioned.
The free software movement has campaigned for computer users’ freedom since 1983. In 1984 we launched
the development of the free operating system GNU, so we could avoid the non-free operating systems that deny freedom to their users. During the 1980s, we developed most of the essential components of such a system, as well as the GNU General Public License (see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html), a license designed specifically to protect freedom for all users of a program.
However, not all of the users and developers of free soft ware agreed with the goals of the free software movement. In 1998, a part of the free software community splintered off and began campaigning in the name of “open source.” The term was originally proposed to avoid a possible misunderstanding of the term “free software,” but it soon became associated with philosophical views quite different from those of the free software movement.
Some of the proponents of “open source” considered it a marketing campaign for free software, which would
appeal to business executives by citing practical benefits, while avoiding ideas of right and wrong they might not like to hear. Other proponents flatly rejected the free software movement’s ethical and social values. Whichever their views, when campaigning for “open source” they did not cite or advocate those values. The term “open source” quickly became associated with the practice of citing only practical values, such as making powerful, reliable software. Most of the supporters of “open source” have come to it since then, and that practice is what they take it to mean.
Nearly all open source software is free software; the two terms describe almost the same category of software. But they stand for views based on fundamentally different values. Open source is a development methodology; free software is a social movement. For the free software movement, free software is an ethical imperative, because only free software respects the users’ freedom. By contrast, the philosophy of open source considers issues in terms of how to make software “better”—in a practical sense only. It says that non-free software is a suboptimal solution. For the free software movement, however, non-free software is a social problem, and moving to free software is the solution.
Free software. Open source. If it’s the same software, does it matter which name you use? Yes, because different words convey different ideas.
References:
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/freesw.html
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/freesw.html
http://www.gnu.org/gnu/linux-and-gnu.html
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