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Comment by Tomte | Hacker News Reader

Of course. Has anyone ever found a case of a license that not one or the other?

The Free Software Definition and the Open Source Definition are structured differently, but pretty obviously map from one to another.

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There's plenty of OSD licenses that don't fit the FSD, but a free software license is necessarily open source, so the opposite can't happen.

No there cannot be an OSD license that violates the FSD

GNU has a helpful chart where they clearly show that there is a sliver of "nonfree open source" licenses that are available [0].

> The term “open source” software is used by some people to mean more or less the same category as free software. It is not exactly the same class of software: they accept some licenses that we consider too restrictive, and there are free software licenses they have not accepted. However, the differences in extension of the category are small: we know of only a few cases of source code that is open source but not free.

I was able to find one example, the NASA Open Source Agreement, which is accepted by the OSI [1] but rejected by the FSF [2]:

> The NASA Open Source Agreement, version 1.3, is not a free software license because it includes a provision requiring changes to be your “original creation”. Free software development depends on combining code from third parties, and the NASA license doesn't permit this.

[0] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/categories.html

[1] https://opensource.org/license/nasa1-3-php

[2] https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#NASA

Guarantee that all "nonfree open source" is different readings. Take the NASA case. If youu read it as strictly as Stallman does then it violates the OSD also. The people at OSI at the time it was submitted read it more like a lawyer and decided it was compliant. Possibly today's OSI would disagree. Possibly tomorrow's FSF would agree. It's not a difference between free software and open source but a difference between how two sets of humans interpreted the text of the license.

Which point of the OSD would be violated by the NASA clause if read the same way that the FSF reads it?

OSD 3

And possibly 9

Eh, OSD 3 just says that derived works must be possible, it doesn't say that you must be able to incorporate third party source code into the derived work. Meanwhile the FSF's definition explicitly calls out this freedom as an essential component of Freedom 1:

> One important way to modify a program is by merging in available free subroutines and modules. If the program's license says that you cannot merge in a suitably licensed existing module—for instance, if it requires you to be the copyright holder of any code you add—then the license is too restrictive to qualify as free.

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html#four-freedoms

I’d really be interested in an example of such a license. Where is the difference in the two definitions?

Not OP, but I linked to some details here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43581484

The NASA Open Source Agreement is the one I found.

Thank you!

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