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Comment by School-Cotton | Hacker News Reader

LLVM is free software. You appear to be making the common mistake of confusing the permissive vs. copyleft distinction with the open source vs. free software distinction.

Open source and free software mean almost exactly the same set of software; the only difference between the two terms, according to RMS and other free software advocates, is the emphasis. Sort of like the difference between the Gulf of America and the Gulf of Mexico: they mean the same body of water, but reflect a different viewpoint about it.

This confusion arises because RMS prefers the term "free software" over "open source", and also prefers copyleft over permissive licenses, so people sort of get the idea that they are the same distinction.

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At least concerning Richard M. Stallman's take on this subject, this characterization is completely wrong.

RMS certainly does not consider the difference between open source and free software to be merely one of 'emphasis.' According to him they are completely different animals. Here are his words on their difference[0]:

> 'When we call software “free,” we mean it respects the users’ essential freedoms: the freedom to run it, to study and change it, and to redistribute copies with or without changes (see http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html). This is a matter of freedom, not price, so think of “free speech,” not “free beer.” ... Nearly all open source software is free software; the two terms describe almost the same category of software. But they stand for views based on fundamentally different values. Open source is a development methodology; free software is a social movement. For the free software movement, free soft- ware is an ethical imperative, because only free software respects the users’ freedom. By contrast, the philosophy of open source considers issues in terms of how to make software “better”—in a practical sense only. It says that non-free software is a suboptimal solution. For the free software movement, however, non-free software [including non-free open source software] is a social problem, and moving to free software is the solution.'

[emphasis and square brackets mine]

It's not that RMS 'prefers the term "free software" over "open source"' but that he prefer software be free instead of non-free. The source being open is just an incomplete precondition for being free.

[0] https://courses.cs.duke.edu/common/compsci092/papers/open/st...

> Open source and free software mean almost exactly the same set of software

> Nearly all open source software is free software; the two terms describe almost the same category of software.

I see no disagreement, how is GP "completely wrong"?

Edit: I'm wrong on my first reply, as pointed out here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46226602

LLVM is free software, and it is a confusion to equate copyleft and free software, though I still maintain that free and open source are very distinct concepts which refer to different categories of licenses. That contrast is better stated by RMS in the article on the subject above which I linked above.

Original reply:

Primarily its this first line here:

>LLVM is free software. You appear to be making the common mistake of confusing the permissive vs. copyleft distinction with the open source vs. free software distinction.

LLVM is NOT free software because it is released under the Apache license, which is an open source license but not a free software license. This is opposed to the linux kernel and GCC which are free software because their source is available under the GPL license. Further it is not really a confusion to equate permissive licensing with open source as distinguished from copyleft and free software. In this context, free is equivalent in meaning to copyleft, as distinguished from the more permissive open source licenses.

> LLVM is NOT free software because it is released under the Apache license, which is an open source license but not a free software license.

GNU disagrees with you: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html

> Apache License, Version 2.0 - This is a free software license, compatible with version 3 of the GNU GPL.

Furthermore:

> Further it is not really a confusion to equate permissive licensing with open source as distinguished from copyleft and free software.

You are in disagreement with the FSF on this issue. "permissive" licenses also follow the Four Essential Freedoms, none of which require viral licensing.

I stand corrected! Thank you for the info.

The four essential freedoms[0] are good reading for the first principles of software freedom concept.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Free_Software_Definition

This is nonsense, and I have no idea why you need to believe it.

Open Source can be used as Free Software because Open Source can be used as proprietary software or anything else, as long as you include the license or mention the author somewhere or whatever. But these are both standards for actual licenses, and the actual licenses are different. Copyleft software can not be included in your proprietary software.

Copyleft software is restrictive. You are required to allow people to access it, and required to redistribute it in source form if you are redistributing it in compiled form (or over the network for modern copyleft licenses.) You are also required to include all of the changes that you have made to the things that you have compiled within that source distribution, and to also distribute other code that is required to to make your software package work under the same licensing.

The confusion is only in people spreading misinformation trying to confuse the two things. You clearly seem to know that RMS can prefer copyleft over permissive licenses, but still need to pretend that there's no difference between the two. If you know that someone can prefer white chocolate to dark chocolate, there's obviously something wrong with you if you in the same breath say that there is no difference between white chocolate and dark chocolate. Why deceive people? What's the point?

If they're all exactly the same, everybody should be using the GPL in Linux then. Shouldn't even be a thought. Why waste time forcing corporate-friendly licenses if it doesn't matter and some people are against them? Shouldn't parsimony rule then?

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