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Comment by dalke | Hacker News Reader

As the FSF would point out, the free software movement is different from open source. If there was no free software movement, or a prohibition on GPL'ed software, then Google could have used other open source tools (eg, *BSD) instead.

One serious concern in the FSF seems to be that a large, programmer-centric company like Google could rewrite most free software, should the license not be compatible with the business model. Eg, the recent brouhaha on a non-GPL replacement for BusyBox and a comment about Google's goal of "reducing the amount of GPL software in user-space for Android devices."

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> As the FSF would point out, the free software movement is different from open source.

They point this out and it's philosophically true, but are there actually any licenses that meet the definition of "open source" but not the definition of "free software" (or vise versa)?

All of the ones that people actually use (GPL, LGPL, BSD, MIT, ISC, and Apache, I think that basically covers it) appear to pass both DFSG and OSI definitions.

Going through the list of licenses which the FSF considers not-free but which are listed on opensource.org as "open source": NASA Open Source Agreement 1.3 (NASA 1.3), Reciprocal Public License (RPL 1.5). I'm hard pressed to think of something which can be considered free software but not open source.

My point though is that you commingled the free software movement with open source efforts. Google etc. could have implemented what they needed from various open source projects which existed at the time but were not part of the free software development.

The major exception, of course, being gcc. It's only now with LLVM that gcc has a serious open source alternative. (I assign that term carefully; LLVM is not part of the free software movement.)

Your distinctions in reality are pretty meaningless, you can be an open source guy using the GPL (look at Linus) or a free software guy using BSD. Both movements overlap enourmously, and the differences between them are very small compared to the rest of the software ecosystem. I wish we could stop all the silly infighting and see that we are all heading in the same direction.

The issue is that I did not like and do not agree with the statement "Google and Facebook would never exist the way they do today without the free software movement."

(There's the trivial sense of "way they do today" in the Microsoft, which uses some BSD technology in Windows, would also be here in the "way they do today" without that technology, but it would be generally the same.)

Do you agree with the above statement? If the free software movement had not existed, would Google and Facebook be seriously different than what they have become? How so?

Also, who is a member of the free software movement who also uses primarily a BSD license?

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