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Comment by bcg1 | Hacker News Reader

Good article, fair, factual. Proper use of the word 'hacker'. Balanced with comments from Tim O'Reilly and accurate distinction made between GPL and BSD/MIT. Good job Maria Bustillos.

Can't believe I just wrote that about an article in The New Yorker. :)

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There is one small terminological mistake which I'll write to the author about: the use of "open source" to mean "non-copyleft (permissively licensed)" as contrasted with "free software" to mean "copyleft (reciprocally licensed)".

I see this all the time, but it's historically unfounded. The Free Software Foundation accepts both copyleft licenses like GPL and noncopyleft licenses like BSD as "free software" and the Open Source Initiative accepts both as "open source". This has always been true, because the Open Source Definition was derived directly from the Debian Free Software Guidelines and "open source is a marketing campaign for free software".

The terms were always intended to have the same denotation and a different connotation (although there are somewhere around 2 non-widely-used licenses whose acceptability FSF and OSI came to different conclusions on).

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/categories.html

The distinction that the author was quite accurately getting at, but ended up missing, is that people who prefer to say "free software" are much more likely to think that copyleft is often preferable to permissive licensing, while people who prefer to say "open source" are less likely to think that. When RMS says "that companies that tout open-source principles often 'seduce our community to release free software without copyleft'" the causal relationships at work are much subtler (since many of those companies release primarily copylefted software, even when they are the copyright holders!).

I think I need to write the canonical Open Source and Free Software Refer to the Same Software page...

I don't disagree with you, but the term "open source" predates the OSI by quite some time and was in common usage to mean "source code you could read" rather than binaries.

OSI may (and have) redefine it, but it is historically founded that it meant readable code delivered with the binaries rather than binaries only.

If "open source" predates OSI, it must have been a very underground word. It doesn't appear before 1998:

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=open+source&ca...

My take on the matter:

http://jordi.inversethought.com/blog/5-things-we-have-forgot...

Thanks for writing that, it's quite similar to what I wanted to write (though probably more humorous).

You are mistaken. The term was not used with reference to available software source code before February 3, 1998; it had a mostly unrelated meaning in espionage.

I've sometimes heard that, but I don't have a personal recollection of hearing the term used that way before. Do you happen to know of particular examples of people using "open source" that way before 1998?

My earliest memory of it was circa 1990 when we had problems getting source code out of escrow for a system, and we were advised to make sure the next system was open source.

Edit: Check this 1993 document by NASA: "National security and national competitiveness: Open source solutions; NASA requirements and capabilities"

https://books.google.fi/books?ei=8YMJVZ6-IIOhPaj8gMAO&id=zYQ...

Like I replied in my blog, that document is about open source intelligence, a completely unrelated term. They're not talking about computers at all.

OK, maybe, it was the first one I came across. Well, you can claim they invented the term in 1998 and I guess I can't convince you otherwise unless I dig up some old documents, which is unlikely.

Anyway, FWIW, we used the terms "open source" and "open source code" way before that and it was widely understood. I don't have any reason to make that up.

> Anyway, FWIW, we used the terms "open source" and "open source code" way before that and it was widely understood. I don't have any reason to make that up.

Perhaps it was your personal jargon. I don't see any evidence that it was widespread before 1998.

I think it's more likely that your memory is failing, and OSI's campaign was so successful that they really convinced you that you always called it "open source". It has been close to two decades, after all. We can forget.

That's what you would interpret if you heard someone say "open source" but that would have been two words put together, not a term. The OSI people invented the term.

I can assure you they didn't.

Edit: Check this 1993 document by NASA: "National security and national competitiveness: Open source solutions; NASA requirements and capabilities"

https://books.google.fi/books?ei=8YMJVZ6-IIOhPaj8gMAO&id=zYQ...

As you can see, that isn't talking about software.

Honestly, The New Yorker is one of the best journalism organizations operating today. Not only are they one of the few that still has a real fact-checking department, but they've been at the cutting edge of adopting serious encryption technology to protect sources.[0]

[0] https://projects.newyorker.com/strongbox/

You and me both. I was prepared for an upper crusty profile making fun of his mannerisms or idealism. Instead I got a clear, concise summary of Stallman and the landscape of software licencing. This will be an excellent introduction for the average person.

The New Yorker is an amazingly humane publication. Not snarky, not haughty, not what many people (who do not read it) think it is. This piece is a representative sample of their journalism.

The New Yorker is like Burning Man - people who've never experienced it have strongly held, fiercely incorrect assumptions about what it is.

@matthewn (can't reply directly to you) - hah! You're right, Anthony Lane is hilarious. And the opera reviews can be boring if you (like me) are not into opera. But you know what I mean =)

I love the New Yorker, but the whole "goings on about town" section is obviously useless if you don't live in New York.

> Not snarky

I see you've never read Anthony Lane's film reviews. :)

Downvotes not justified. Lane's reviews are distressingly snarktastic.

You must not read the New Yorker very often. I don't think I've seen an article that I would describe as "making fun" of anyone in ~25 years of reading.

True... and to be fair, I also don't watch television, use any of the popular social networks other than Github, I don't have a cell phone, and my default position on anything uttered by a politician is that it is a lie.

My comment was more an indictment of mainstream news at large, so if I inappropriately cast aspersions on a good publication, I apologize.

I'm just as astounded that GNU is being mentioned in what I would consider the mainstream media.

Maria Bustillos is great. A nerd with good politics and great skill at the craft of writing. She is also one of my favorite people to follow on Twitter for calling attention to other good writers.

> Good job Maria Bustillos.

> Can't believe I just wrote that about an article in The New Yorker. :)

I put that more on the former than the latter, Bustillos is an excellent writer.

O'Reilly is wrong, though: Permissive licenses are more like Thelema ("do what thou wilt...") than Christianity.

No, thelema and aleister both espouse: do whatever you want, regardless the damage or injury you cause.

Just like Aleister and K2. He never was a mountaineer again after he let 17 die. But I'm sure complete selfishness and arrogance is a virtue to those.

You don't think that Thelema's "Do what thou wilt" and the BSD licenses' "Permission to use...this software for any purpose with or without fee is hereby granted" are very similar?

Also, if you're referring to the K2 summit attempt in 1902 led by Eckenstein, I was under the impression that no one died despite the fact that they failed to summit:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K2#Early_attempts

However, Crowley's 1905 trip to Kanchenjunga was an unmitigated disaster. Crowley, who insisted on leading the climb, behaved extremely badly, going so far as to decline assisting in the rescue of fellow climbers and porters caught in an avalanche as well as later stealing money from the expedition. I'm under the impression that Crowley was only interested in setting a high altitude record. Four people ended up dying:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1905_Kanchenjunga_expedition

Crowley did go on some kind of climbing holiday in New York State later in life, but I doubt that was anything like his earlier trips to the Alps, Mexico, or the Himalayas.

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