

How Open-Source Won Over Free Software - adambenayoun
http://www.binpress.com/blog/2013/10/02/open-source-won-free-software/

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bitwize
I like to say that in Lisp terms, open source and free software are EQUAL? but
not EQ?. That is to say, they refer to the same thing structurally but arrived
at it via different means.

Indeed, open source is pretty much just marketing gloss over free software.
Eric Raymond, the popularizer of the term open source, is remarkably similar
to Stallman in terms of his ethical perspective on the matter: he feels that
proprietary software is just plain _wrong_ and that conditions under which
proprietary software are abusive to end users and developers alike. But it was
useless to try and sell that to businesses, so the OSI focused on the
pragmatic (read: bottom-line) benefits of open source software in order to get
businesses on board.

I'm not sure yet which is the better hack: RMS turning copyright on its head
to ccreate copyleft and the GPL, or the OSI turning marketroid cant on its
head to make free software buzzword-compliant. Both of these are culture-
jamming of a scale and potency that Shepard Fairey can only dream of.

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adamtal1
Awesome content as always.

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vezzy-fnord
#2 is misleading. Of course the FSF endorses the GPL and copyleft, but there's
plenty of other free software licenses, most of them GPL-compatible, such as
most of the BSD licenses.

Then for copyleft purists who insist on having specific redistribution
agreements, there's plenty of alternatives there too.

As for me, I'll stick to the WTFPL.

