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Comment by ldarby | Hacker News Reader

Open Source includes BSD style licenses, which allow distribution in binary form only. Free Software doesn't, that's the difference and I think that difference is large enough to make them not synonyms.

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You are not alone in thinking that only copyleft licenses are free. I think people get this association from GPL = free = Stallman = copyleft, since rms does keep talking about all of those things, so that's what people think he is saying (or they get it second-hand from people talking about what rms said). However, rms has never said that non-copyleft licenses are not free. He does call them weak or pushover licenses, though, but he doesn't think they're wrong.

Ok, thanks for clarifying that, you're right I was thinking that free = copyleft. This came from thinking that open source = non-copyleft + copyleft, and that it doesn't care at all about copyleft, while FS does, so FS = OS - non-copyleft = copyleft.

That is false. Free software includes BSD licenses. You are thinking of copyleft licenses.

Isn't the parent commenter correct that BSD permits a developer to distribute a binary without offering the source? At the same time, a free software developer can incorporate and distribute BSD libraries without compromising a free license like GPL.

The BSD license does so permit, but this only means that it is not a copyleft license; it is still a free software license.

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/categories.html#Non-Copylefted...

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