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Over at the Open Source Initiative, Simon Phipps writes about the past, present, and future of Open Source Software as it turns 20 this year. Thought of in a strategy session on how to make Free Software more palatable to certain business interests, the orignal idea was for it to be a stepping stone from proprietary to Free Software by focusing first on the advantages of the developmental model.
Thirty-five years ago when Richard Stallman decided that he could no longer tolerate proprietary software, and started the free software movement, software freedom was misunderstood and dismissed. Twenty years ago a group of free software advocates gathered in California and decided that software freedom needed to be brought to the business world. The result was a marketing program called "open source". That same month, February 1998, the Open Source Initiative (OSI) was founded as a general educational and advocacy organization to raise awareness and adoption for the superiority of an open development process.
Of course, old-timers will remind us that originally software was source and binaries did not count. Up until the late 1970s or early 1980s, when you bought software, it was source.
Source : Happy Anniversary—The Next 20 Years of Open Source Begins Today
Related:
https://perens.com/2017/09/26/on-usage-of-the-phrase-open-source/
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Sunday February 04 2018, @04:37PM (7 children)
No, it doesn't miss the point at all, it simply doesn't aspire to the same level of Freedom that Free Software does.
There's a whole range of software freedom out there, ranging from completely closed-source and proprietary at one end, to Stallman's ideal Free Software at the other end. Not all software needs to be at one end of the spectrum or the other. For instance, Microsoft's crappy "Shared Source" is still better (for customers who have access to it) than completely closed software, because at least you can inspect it and see how it works internally if you're having some problem. Yeah, you can't really compile it or modify it, but it's better than nothing. Other licenses might place the source code (plus all build tools needed) into escrow, so that a customer can have access to everything needed in case a vendor folds. Again, not as good certainly as the GPL, but still better than being SOL if your software vendor disappears. A license allowing you source access and the ability to modify, but prohibiting redistribution, could be a good option for a software vendor and customer. The GPL is great for Free software, but it makes profiting off software sales pretty much impossible. For stuff like Linux, that's fine, the contributors to Linux (kernel) aren't trying to profit from software sales. For a company that profits entirely from support services, that could be a fine option too. Someone trying to make a living off of sales, however, isn't going to get far with the GPL since their first customer can just post it on the internet for the whole world to use for free.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by opinionated_science on Sunday February 04 2018, @06:35PM (5 children)
Redhat seems to have found a way.
Remember kids, artificial scarcity is the way to raise prices in a "free market".
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Sunday February 04 2018, @06:38PM (3 children)
What works for one company isn't guaranteed to work for others. Red Hat doesn't even make any application software to my knowledge, they just handle the OS.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by opinionated_science on Sunday February 04 2018, @07:32PM (1 child)
well Ubuntu builds on debian. Of course the amount of money they burnt on Mir, just to have control.
I get why companies want control, it's their money.
But the world would be a much better place if API's and specs were written first, to avoid the proprietary mould from infrecting GPL principles.
Make no mistake, EVERY $CORP wants TOTAL control. Software and remote operation just makes it easier.
GPL forever.
11 years Windoze free....
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Sunday February 04 2018, @08:28PM
I get why companies want control, it's their money.
Companies want control because they can make more profit that way. Lock-in gets you more profit because customers can't easily leave for a competitor, for instance.
But the world would be a much better place if API's and specs were written first, to avoid the proprietary mould from infrecting GPL principles.
If your software is GPL and freely downloadable, having APIs written beforehand isn't all that necessary since you can just consult the source for how the APIs are now. Of course, if the devs are constantly changing the APIs a la Gnome3/Gtk, that can be a real problem unless you fork it, but that doesn't usually work out well unless you can get everyone to follow your fork (like with XFree86->X.org).
GPL forever.
GPL is great and all, but what if you're a company and you need some piece of application software for important business reasons, and your only real choices are proprietary? Best case, that proprietary software should run on Linux, so you can at least have a FOSS IT infrastructure and not have to worry about Microsoft screwing everything up with one of their updates, and so that you have your own control over it, even if you don't have control over every single application you run on it. To me, it's FAR more important for the infrastructure to be FOSS than for applications to be. Proprietary file formats are of course a problem, but not nearly as bad as your whole OS being proprietary. If I were more clever, I'd make some kind of analogy here about building foundations.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Monday February 05 2018, @06:07AM
Of all the crazy things, Red Hat once offered to buy my consultancy. I turned it down because I knew that I would be required to build every customer solution entirely out of Red Hat products.
Microsoft too.
I should have taken the money then left the country to go trekking in the Amazon rainforest. I've always wanted to do that.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 2) by realDonaldTrump on Monday February 05 2018, @02:52AM
Red Hat, great American company. They have tremendous contracts with my Department of Defense.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 05 2018, @02:54AM
Software that does not respect all of a users' freedoms is inherently unjust. Injustices do not become morally okay simply because someone can profit off of them, either.