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Comment by jordigh | Hacker News Reader

Open source means free software means freedom.

Although in the past MSFT has used non-free, source-visible licenses, they seem to understand very well what "open source" means. I don't think they use their "shared source" licenses for new things. If they are serious about freeing Windows, I'm sure they will do it under a free license.

Edit: Sigh, downvotes already, so here is your reminder of where open source comes from and what it means:

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

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To give a concrete counterexample:

one of my favorite video games, Descent, has been open source for about 15 years. I have four different source ports on my system right now (d1x, rebirth, retro, and d2x-xl) each of which is free to download, install, run, and even modify. But some of the game assets (textures, ship polymodels) are not free; you must buy a copy of the game [0] to acquire a license to those asset files, or play using only the shareware assets [1].

[0] http://www.gog.com/game/descent_1_descent_2 or http://steamcommunity.com/app/273570

[1] prepackaged with the rebirth/retro ports at http://descendentstudios.com/community/topic/1167-descent-sh... , where they're being used as a marketing tool for the currently-being-kickstarted Descent:Underground game at https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/descendentstudios/desce...

That's not a counterexample. The engine is free software and open source. There just isn't any free and open source material to run it on.

The same situation happens with Doom and Freedoom, but the existence or not of Freedoom doesn't change whether the Doom engine itself is open source or free.

After all, people are free to run the Doom engine on Freedoom. People are also free to do the same for Descent, I assume. If the Descent license were to forbid running Descent on your own custom-made game assets, then it would not be open source nor free software.

So I went to see what the license is. It says, "You are allowed to use this code only for non-commercial, non-revenue generating purposes only."

Forbidding commercial use invalidates the Descent engine as being open source. The Doom engine does not have this restriction.

Interesting. I had no idea "open source" meant so much more than "here's the source code and it's OK to modify it".

http://opensource.org/osd

It's supposed to:

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

That's right. Open Source typically means OSI approved license. Sadly, Open Source gets used as a term to refer to things that are inclusive in some way, or where access to source code is given without the bundle of rights associated with OSI approved licenses.

As RMS says, all Free Software is open source. I believe the converse statement to be true always or nearly always all the time. Though the licenses are the same, the guiding philosophies are different. Open Source tends to focus on the benefits of openness, such as quality resulting from many reviewers. By contrast, RMS and the Free software folks will tell you that quality isn't the primary aim--the 4 freedoms are.

In terms of licenses, Copyleft licenses are a subset of Free and Open Source licenses that restrict the ability to make derived works non-Free/Open. E.g. BSD is Free software, but not Copyleft.

Wait a second, since when did OSI (or any group in particular, for that matter) become the ultimate arbiter on what "open source" means?

I'm not saying this to be argumentative - I don't like the idea of something like that in the hands of a bureaucracy.

1998, when they were founded to start promoting the term "Open Source" over "Free Software" to make GPL/BSD etc license software more business friendly.

I took a quick look through https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=%22open+source... and I couldn't see the term being used in a software context before 1998.

Huh, something's wrong with that link. Should be:

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

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