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I can't get away from the subject of open source software (OSS) even on my lazy day, Sunday. Today's Boston Globe editorial pages have an opinion column titled Free Beer purportedly explaining open source software in the context of a bunch of Scandanavian kids that have started an OSS-like movement for their home brew. I think you have to subscribe to the Globe to read the article unless you read it today Feb 18 (and even then you have to register) but the author, Attorney Henry Lanman, writes for Slate and other publications so the article or one like it will probably show up elsewhere. In the spirit of the Free Software Foundation (FSF), I could just copy and paste it here--given my acknowledgement of the Globe--but I believe that to be a violation of the Globe's intellectual property (IP) rights as publisher.

The article covers issues I have written on at my IT Investment Research website but which I have avoided so far on ebizQ: the not so trivial but eventually inconsequential difference between the FSF's ideals and the broader OSS movement's philosophy. Not unexpectedly, an article written for a daily metropolitan newspaper still misses some of the nuances:
-- Even the FSF makes the point that its message is not about "free software" as in the example that Quicken is often given out free by banks to entice you to use their banking services (or in the way the dastardly Microsoft provides Office Live free to try to get small businesspeople to use its business applications); that is the point behind the FSF mantra "think of free speech not free beer."
-- The "free software" idea in the FSF sense (meaning--among other things--that others can take the source code and modify it and redistribute it freely as long as they don't add restrictions) predates Richard Stallman and the FSF; the idea is more from the early 60s than early 80s and could even be said to date to the 1955 founding of the IBM COMMON users group
-- It's not the case that developers first started asserting IP rights in the early 80s; it's just that IP rights did not mean much until then because before that time, the software was pretty much locked into whatever hardware it was written on; the former Data General started asserting its IP rights in its software almost from its founding in 1968 and lost a great deal of money in the 1980s when those rights were not upheld in Federal Appeals Court and failed to get a hearing at the Supreme Court level (given changes in the law and subsequent court proceedings, DG probably would win the lawsuit today)
-- Though the OSS culture and commerical backers propagandize that the OSS development model results in higher quality programs, there is no empirical evidence of that (and it defies logic); that was not the reason that the broader OSS movement broke with the FSF (or vice versa)--the split is all about IP rights
-- There is nothing in the evolution of acceptance of the Linux operating system (characterized as the "success of the Linux operating system" in the article) that could in any way be tied to the idea that OSS=higher quality software (implicitly, higher quality than Microsoft since it is unlikely that anyone that makes this claim means higher quality than IBM's mainframe software); Linux-based operating software has been gradually replacing operating software based on earlier versions of UNIX over the last 15 years because Linux is a descendant of UNIX and that's the way the UNIX market has always evolved (acceptance of Windows continues to outpace acceptance of Linux--see my post of February 9 and other research particularly from IDC)
-- The word "source" in the term "open source software" also needs to be explained better and understood in terms of the OSS movement but as I said, Sunday is my lazy day

I told ebizQ when I started this blogging activity that I was agnostic about the Microsoft vs. OSS war. I am not going to enage in the Microhate that appears on most OSS blogs, and conversely, in my wider research, I am often critical of Microsoft where it is deserving. I say some things above that the OSS community will find pro-Microsoft but I contend that they are "just the facts, ma'am." If you want to debate about them or add some additional factoids to the discussion, please do not hesitate to comment below.

((By the way, I believe the FSF vs. OSS distinction is inconsequential because if Linus had not--almost aribrarily I think--chosen the FSF's General Public License (GPL) when he was figuring out how to distribute Linux (he could have chosen the Berkeley license or at least a half dozen other means), the FSF would be simply a footnote in IT history. To the extent the FSF is of any consequence today, it is because of its ownership of the GPL license and not because of technical contributions.))

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