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viewpoints
DOI: 10.1145/1516046.1516058
viewpoint
Why “open source” misses
the Point of Free software
Decoding the important differences in terminology, underlying philosophy,
and value systems between two similar categories of software.
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.
