[Gllug] An article for you from an Economist.com reader.

[Richard Cohen]

On Fri, 18 Jun 2004 12:45:36 +0100, Doug Winter <doug at pigeonhold.com> wrote:
> On Fri 18 Jun Richard Cohen wrote:
> > You should feel free to write a concise, eloquent letter to The
> > Economist, point out the difference between free software and open
> > source software, and GNU's rightful place in the ecosystem.  Just try
> > not to sound like a foaming-at-the-mouth hippie or commie, and you'd
> > have a good chance of getting it printed, I think. :-)
> 
> But there isn't any difference.  Calling stuff "Open Source" was just a
> marketing exercise really, because someone decided companies won't like
> the idea of foaming-at-the-mouth hippies going on about freedom :)
> 
> doug.

Certainly, that was the original stated intention at the launch of the
term Open Source, but it's not really been true in practice for quite
a while.  I would argue that the silly attempts to get people to say
GNU/Linux are a direct consequence of that, since Linux falls much
more on the Open Source side of the philisophy in many ways, rather
than the free software side.

I think the differences can largely be summed up as: Open Source is
better because it makes better, more secure, more reliable software,
while Free Software is better because it redresses the balance of
power between users, vendors and developers, promotes an ecosystem of
shared and sharable code from which people can learn, and - through
copyleft - prevents that from being taken away at someone's whim.

Or something like that :-)

Cheers
Richard
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