Free and Open Source … yay

want it or not, these 2 philosophies are dependent on each other.

having only one of them = i believe we would be staying in the world of proprietary – with very few choice of non-proprietary. with the non-proprietary softwares ended up proprietary in ways similar to MacOS become proprietary from FreeBSD.

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
http://www.opensource.org/docs/definition.php

“Open source software and free software are different terms for software which comes with certain rights, or freedoms, for the user. They describe two approaches and philosophies towards free software. Open source and free software (or software libre) both describe software which is free from onerous licensing restrictions. It may be used, copied, studied, modified and redistributed without restriction. Free software is not the same as freeware, software available at zero price.”

Long Live Freedom! whatever you choose to call that as.

yk

But jokes aside, there is no logical explanation why both movements are treated differently by RMS. It’s an issue with the belief system. From my personal experience, these kind of issues cannot be explained logically and why must it be different. For RMS, it just had to be that way.

For the rest of the community, it’s much healthier to move on & let the belief system absorbs itself into the practitioners of free open source software & the philosophy behind it.

Maybe in the near future, you are the person who decides on policies. But from what I see now, you can influence it :)

@Yoonkit I too don’t want to bite flame. I’m not even close to the level of knowledge to even start to argue about it. I only feel sad.

@Rafe I am not the most knowledgeable person. If I was, I would have not need a job & would tell myself to take a hike hehe :) I only hope you would realise soon and if you would be able to recap the day itself again, RMS had never enforced anyone to be like him. He looked as if he was preaching and enforcing everyone to be like him. But from my point of view, he never did force me to be like him. I did not even feel the pressure. And I think 99% of the hackers in the room felt the same way too. It was a culture shock listening to him outright refusing the concept of Open Source. RMS is just like Dr. Mahathir or Anwar Ibrahim, a figure that people look up to and will listen to. But people do not necessarily follow them right up to the nines, right? Same situation applies to us hackers as well. We believe in RMS strong principles, but we are not that hardcore. My only hope is that as a person who can influence policies, please do not straight away jump the gun after listening to RMS. Your actions & words are very important to the community that you are spearheading. Furthermore, it’s the same community that built it’s values on both the principles of Free Software Movement and Open Source. But if you start to separate these 2 beliefs, I can only hope the best for OSDC.my. I learned the hard way for making mistakes & being publicly irrational with my own words. Like Ben have mentioned, it’s only a moniker for distinction. To separate the hardcore believers like RMS from the rest of us. But the cause is the same. Hence, the BN/BR example. I personally will never let down the principles behind free software and open source. But I will be less of a zealot if I wanted to build a business around it. It’s contradicting, I know. But that is the reality of the world we live in. Can’t make everyone happy right? But I hope you don’t get me wrong Rafe :)

I wont bite the BSD vs GNU flamebait, or we will have a similar MySQL vs GNU flamewar as per the video, which is irrelevant to the scary issue at hand.

Hopefully with a little bit of education we can solve this.

yk