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Comment by captainmuon | Hacker News Reader

The distinction between Open Source and Free Software seems increasingly silly to me (as a user and someone who has to program for his job, but is not a developer, and is not terribly interested in licenses). Both are open source (lowercase) as in, I can see the source openly. That's what's important for me, personally. Then there is the question of Copyleft or not, which is partially orthogonal to that. Copyleft is this neat hack of the copyright system where you can make people who use your code (and care about copyright) share their code, too. I think the real question Stallman is addressing is copyleft vs. non-copyleft.

) In fact, I'd be really happy if e.g. Microsoft would "open their source", that is show the source code to Windows, even under a ultra non-permissive license a la: "You may not use this for anything."

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All copyleft really is a cost. "I will give you the fruits of my labor, but in exchange, you must share your enhancements on the same terms."

Being able to see the source isn't very useful at all, at least if you do something significant with it. You can pretty easily access Windows source code, but doing so "taints" you with NDAs and other hooks that potentially make it difficult for you to apply whatever you learned in your own products.

Saying that things like the GPL are silly because complying with it brings you some short-term angst is a really short-term thought pattern.

People bitch about GPL in Linux because of things like ZFS and graphics drivers. But without GPL, who is to say that you would be able to actually build a operating system that supports as broad an array of hardware and features as linux does?

All copyleft really is a cost. "I will give you the fruits of my labor, but in exchange, you must share your enhancements on the same terms."

I'd re-word it as "in exchange, if you share your enhancements, you must do so on the same terms". Because lots of people think that if you modify for your personal use, or if a company modifies for its own internal use, they must share those changes, which is not true.

Is the distinction between "advanced interrogation techniques" and "torture" also silly to you? How about the distinction between a republic and a democracy? Or the distinction between socialism and communism?

Copyleft vs non-copyleft is not the distinction between free and open source. The distinction is about the emphasis in the language, that's all. Stallman wants people to think about their freedom. The open source initiative wants to sweep this freedom talk under the rug.

Yes, it depends, and no, respectively.

In fact, I'd be really happy if e.g. Microsoft would "open their source", that is show the source code to Windows, even under a ultra non-permissive license a la: "You may not use this for anything."

That is proprietary software. Source code by itself is useless when you have no rights to go with it. This is why "open source" is such a sly term. Companies can very easily pull off shenanigans like in your hypothetical scenario and then hide behind the banner of "open source". They would also technically be correct, even if not abiding by the OSI. After all, it sure as hell isn't closed source!

Free software, so long as you specify "libre" or "free as in freedom", is unequivocal. Bullshit like freely viewable source without distribution rights doesn't cut it.

Your views are misguided, and are even potentially harmful.

There are plenty of benefits to being able to read the code without the ability to distribute it. Two things come immediately to mind:

1. Is the software secure? Are there gaping security holes riddled through the source? Think about all the times you hear about people "working on getting the project ready for open source". Often this is due to vulnerabilities that are ticking time bombs waiting to go off as soon as the security by obscurity clock runs out.

2. There may be GPL code in the source that is being used in violation of the license. I would not be at all surprised if a significant chunk of closed proprietary software is using GPL code, but no one knows because they cannot read the source.

Both of these points are moot if you simply avoid proprietary software altogether RMS style, but only a tiny fraction of users are going to do that. Of course, these benefits are also the reasons why this will never happen.

> This is why "open source" is such a sly term. Companies can very easily pull off shenanigans like in your hypothetical scenario and then hide behind the banner of "open source".

They would be technically incorrect to do so. Microsoft tried, but they had to retreat to "shared source" because of the backlash.

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