You will see that a number of licenses have gone through an evolution. This evolution, in some cases has moved the license from non-free to free, but the bar for OSI is lower: there are cases where you can be excused from source code disclosure, even for derived works (depending on the license). Item 3 in the open source definition <a href="http://www.opensource.org/docs/definition.php" title="opensource.org">http://www.opensource.org/docs/definition.php</a opensource.org> implies that a license can be accepted by OSI that merely allows (does not require) an existing OSI-approved license to be applied to a derived work. But you can (depending on the original license of the work) shroud the derived work. The author of such a work cannot claim OSS for anything, but they can start with an OSI-approved (not all of them, I know) licensed work and distribute a binary only derived work. That is the opposite of software emancipation, that is software enslavement.
The copyleft style of the GPL is there to emancipate the software itself, it does this through the user by binding them to the license. All derived works are compelled to provide source code (if you distribute the derived work at all), unless you can put all your "stuff" into a completely self-contained external entity that can be reasonably argued as independent (perhaps as a separate shared object or executable) of the GPLed "product", which does happen, but is rarer. (NVidia and ATI drivers, ugh.)
Now, I have read a lot of the rhetoric from the OSI and ESR, and I understand where they are coming from, but the fact that over time more and more OSI-approved licenses have been climbing the "free" ladder says a lot about what "consumers" of "open source" software want which is namely protection from the possibility that their work will be ensnared into software slavery. This is a good thing, and it is also good that most OSI-approved licenses also meet this criteria. But what is frustrating is that the OSI won't even acknowledge this as important. They would rather continue to carry on with this "non-ideological" approach where they remove particular requirements for their license acceptance criteria that ensures that ugly "freedom" principle that the FSF-thumping crowd are on about.
So, in the end there are still real differences, both on an ideological and practical level: OSI *can* approve a license that does not ensure the perpetual freedom of the software; where as the FSF would never recommend such a license.
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Re:remember these facts next time
Posted by: pennystinker on January 30, 2006 10:45 AMI think you are confused about the definitions of free and open.
It is possible I may be confused, but I don't think so. If you look at:
<a href="http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html" title="gnu.org">http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html</a gnu.org>
You will see that a number of licenses have gone through an evolution. This evolution, in some cases has moved the license from non-free to free, but the bar for OSI is lower: there are cases where you can be excused from source code disclosure, even for derived works (depending on the license). Item 3 in the open source definition <a href="http://www.opensource.org/docs/definition.php" title="opensource.org">http://www.opensource.org/docs/definition.php</a opensource.org> implies that a license can be accepted by OSI that merely allows (does not require) an existing OSI-approved license to be applied to a derived work. But you can (depending on the original license of the work) shroud the derived work. The author of such a work cannot claim OSS for anything, but they can start with an OSI-approved (not all of them, I know) licensed work and distribute a binary only derived work. That is the opposite of software emancipation, that is software enslavement.
The copyleft style of the GPL is there to emancipate the software itself, it does this through the user by binding them to the license. All derived works are compelled to provide source code (if you distribute the derived work at all), unless you can put all your "stuff" into a completely self-contained external entity that can be reasonably argued as independent (perhaps as a separate shared object or executable) of the GPLed "product", which does happen, but is rarer. (NVidia and ATI drivers, ugh.)
Now, I have read a lot of the rhetoric from the OSI and ESR, and I understand where they are coming from, but the fact that over time more and more OSI-approved licenses have been climbing the "free" ladder says a lot about what "consumers" of "open source" software want which is namely protection from the possibility that their work will be ensnared into software slavery. This is a good thing, and it is also good that most OSI-approved licenses also meet this criteria. But what is frustrating is that the OSI won't even acknowledge this as important. They would rather continue to carry on with this "non-ideological" approach where they remove particular requirements for their license acceptance criteria that ensures that ugly "freedom" principle that the FSF-thumping crowd are on about.
So, in the end there are still real differences, both on an ideological and practical level: OSI *can* approve a license that does not ensure the perpetual freedom of the software; where as the FSF would never recommend such a license.
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