Jonathan distorted definition of 'free'? It seems that whenever Jonathan speaks, there's a platoon of people
ready to pounce on his words. Well, okay, I've done a bit of that
myself, because some of what he says sounds a little strange.
But, in the case in front of me, they seem to have gone too far.
Sun 'distorts' definition of free software (Ingrid Marson in San Francisco, ZDNet UK, July 01, 2005, 12:05 BST) with a related slashdot thread.
Here's how Ingrid Marson quotes him:
"I want to talk about FOSS — free and open source software. Now just to
relay my bias, if you had to ask me what's the most important initial
in free and open source software, to me, if you want to reach the
broadest marketplace in the world there's one price that works for
everyone, and that's free… and so the free part is what we've been
focused on," said Schwartz.
The article goes on to quote open source luminaries (e.g. Richard Stallman) as to how Jonathan doesn't "get" what the word "free" means in this context, and then goes on to slam Sun over this.
Yes, the meaning of 'free' the open source movement wishes to use is 'freedom' and 'freedom' is rarely costing $0. On the other hand, Jonathan is clearly saying the meaning of "free" that's in his opinion important is $0 cost. So it's not terribly fair to dis Jonathan for clearly stating his opinion, is it?
It appears to me the distortion is as much from the author of the article, and the sources she quotes, as in what Jonathan said. Jonathan has been following this line of reasoning in public for quite awhile - such as dissing Red Hat for charging a $2000+ fee for what's supposed to be "free" software. The software in question, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, costs quite a bit to get from Red Hat because it's really a support fee, it's still "freedomized" software because you can get pretty much exactly the same thing as "White Box Enterprise Linux" (built by taking RHEL, filing off the serial numbers, and recompiling).
Why do I say the author and her sources are distorting just as much as Jonathan? Why, simply because of how they're taking the statement and applying it to the unrelated point of whether Java should be Open Source or not. The articles sources obviously have an axe to grind on that subject, which they've been doing for several years.
Sun has clearly stated over and over that we've studied the issue of making Java Open Source, and we've studied it at length. The "compatibility" issue is the key argument we've put forth. That - say Java were to be open sourced under a license that meets the official definition - that means others can fork Java, and once Java is forked then compatibility goes out the window.
What we've done is tweak the licenses several times until at this point Java is available under a very liberal license, which gives a lot of freedoms. See https://mustang.dev.java.net/ for more details.
I'm sorry if some in the Open Source community aren't happy with those freedoms. The fact is that the owner of a project gets to choose the license under which it is published. That goes true for all the projects at http://www.gnu.org/ just as it does with Java.
(2005-07-01 17:36:10.0) Permalink Comments [1]
