Summary for readings on May 19th

Reading set on May 19th is on BSD license, open source movement, and open source licenses. In [1], it mentions that, upon releasing a software under BSD license, the user must follow restrictions:


"one should not claim that they wrote the software if they did not write it and one should not sue the developer if the software does not function as expected or as desired."


In addition, a BSD license can also include a clause to restrict the use of the project name. [1] introduces the term derivative work and provides its definition as following:


"derivative work is a product that is based on, or incorporates, one or more already existing works."


It is obvious to see that the primary goal of BSD license is to protect the copyright of the derivative work by setting restriction on the users. One evidence to shows that BSD license is advantageous to proprietary software devlopers:


"BSD-style licenses do not require that derivative works based on BSD-licensed software make the source code for such derivative works freely available....This allows the direct incorporation of code from open source projects into closed source projects."


This defies fundamental principle of GPL in term of software sharing since GPL prohabits closure of source codes. So, BSD is serving software developers whom intend to derive closed source softwares from the existing open source software. One interesting point made in [1] is that the software developers tend to make their source eventually available, the author of [1] did not provide reason why the software developers would do so.

[1] indicates that the original BSD license contained an advertising clause to display software information and acknowledgment that the product "includes software develped by the University of California, Berkeley and its contributors". However, there are two problems with use of advertising clause:


1. "This (advertising clause) could easily result in large and cumbersome acknowledgments for products with numerous contributors and for software distributions consisting of multiple individual projects."
2. "...legal incompatibility with the terms of the GPL. This is because the GPL prohibits the addition of restrictions beyond those that it already imposes. Thus it was necessary to segregate GPL and BSD-licensed software within projects."

Therefore, this advertising clause has been taken out to avoid the above problems.

[2] is written by Eric Raymond. Raymond is the author of “A Brief History of Hackerdom” in 1996, an editor of the 1st edition of The New Hacker’s Dictionary in 1990, and is considered to be a hacker culture’s historian and resident ethnographer. He described his first encountering to Linux in late 1993 was a shocking experience. Raymond is surprised how Torvalds and his teams had put together Linux with more features exceeding the original Unix. In the following years, he has studied the methodology of how Torvalds and his team have succeeded and beaten the Brooks’s Law:


“…as your N number of programmers rises, work performed scales as N but complexity and vulnerability to bugs rises as N-squared.”


After the closed observation and experimenting, Raymond wrote “The Cathedral and the Bazaar” (CatB). Raymond’ CatB has inspired Netscape to decide the release of its browser source code to the public. Netscape has done so to compete against Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and Microsoft’s plan “to bend the Web’s protocols away from open standards and into proprietary channels that only Microsoft’s servers would be able to service”. Raymond then has helped Netscape to develop the Mozilla Public License and found the Mozilla organization.

The term “open source” is invented in a meeting with Raymond, Torvalds, and the others. Free software is to replace “free software”, as:


“It seemed clear to us in retrospect that the term "free software" had done our (hackers) movement tremendous damage over the years.”


In the “open source” campaign, Raymond has taken the role to promote “free software” movement in front of press. A few months after Netscape has released its source code, Oracle and Informix have also decided to support Linux. The Mircosoft’s “Halloween Documents” have created a new surge of interest in the open source phenomenon.

After reading through [2], I personally think Raymond’s free software campaign was a success. As the result of the campaign, he mentioned that “Netscape’s browser reversed its market-share slide and began to make gains against Internet Explorer”. Comparing to Stallman, the main ingredient of Raymond’s success is that Raymond has allied with Netscape in the competition against Microsoft, and, at the same time, he also promoted open source movement within the Netscape browser’s user community.

[3] is on the open source definition by Bruce Perens. He is the leader of the Debian project. He states the rights of programmers who contribute to Open Source:


“The right to make copies of the program, and distribute those copies.”
“The right to have access to the software's source code, a necessary preliminary before you can change it.”
“The right to make improvements to the program.”


Perens claims that free software is not a new concept. This concept is popularized by Stallman when he founded
Free Software Foundation and GNU project. The Open Source Definition includes many Stallman’s free software ideas. Raymond stated the idea for Open Source, because he is “concerned that conservative business people were put off by Stallman's freedom pitch” and “this was stifling the development of Linux in the business world”. Perens edited the Debian Free Software Guidelines to form the Open Source Definition.

As an example of a non-open software turns into open software by public demand, Petern specified the “KDE, Qt and Troll Tech” case:


“KDE applications were themselves under the GPL, but they depended on a proprietary graphical library called Qt, from Troll Tech. Qt's license terms prohibited modification or use with any display software other than the senescent X Window System”


This conflict ends when Troll eventually announced the release of open-source version of Qt.
One worth noting in The Open Source Definition (Version 1.0) is that author can give permission to modify the original source code. When the program is made available to the user, the source code can be attached to the program or the source code can be downloaded via the Internet. Modification can also take the form of patch files which leaves the source code unchanged.
[3] suggests uses of different licenses to author with different interests. For example, on the issue of whether to take the modification to the private or not:


“If you want to get the source code for modifications back from the people who make them, apply a license that mandates this. The GPL and LGPL would be good choices. If you don't mind people taking modifications private, use the X or Apache license.”


Or on the issue whether to allow merge the program with the proprietary software:


“If so (allow the merge with proprietary), use the LGPL, which explicitly allows this without allowing people to make modifications to your own code private, or use the X or Apache licenses, which do allow modifications to be kept private.”


It is interesting to see that variety of licenses is listed with different with feature in [3]. Petern does not really forbid use of other licenses outside of open source license, and he merely suggests use difference licenses to meet the authors’ needs. However, he does urge to choice a appropriate license instead of create a new license for the new software, because “fragments of one program cannot be used in another program with an incompatible license.”

[4] is written by Stallman. Stallman claims that it is a misinterpretation to refer “open source” as “free software” nowadays, but the philosophy of open source is not the same as the one of free software in the way that open source does not mention the freedoms of user as free software would describe. Stallman also objects to that idea that open source movement is “marketing campaign for free software”.


“The two terms (“open source” and “free software”) describe almost the same category of software, but they stand for views based on fundamentally different values. Open source is a development methodology; free software is a social movement. For the free software movement, free software is an ethical imperative, because only free software respects the users' freedom. By contrast, the philosophy of open source considers issues in terms of how to make software “better”—in a practical sense only.”


Stallman also describes open source is different to free software that:


“it (open source) is a little looser in some respects, so the open source people have accepted a few licenses that we consider unacceptably restrictive.”


Further more:


“The idea of open source is that allowing users to change and redistribute the software will make it more powerful and reliable. But this is not guaranteed. Developers of proprietary software are not necessarily incompetent. Sometimes they produce a program that is powerful and reliable, even though it does not respect the users' freedom.”


In Stallman’s view, free software values user freedoms and ethics more than open source does. Open source still wants to restrict user in sake of producing power and reliable software:


“They (leaders of open source) figured that by keeping quiet about ethics and freedom, and talking only about the immediate practical benefits of certain free software, they might be able to “sell” the software more effectively to certain users, especially business.”


[5] is a letter by Bruce Perens to Debian community and co-founder of Open Source Initiative. Perens was in Raymond’s team in the open source campaign. In the letter, Perens is showing the concern about schism of “free software” community and “open source” community. He feared that open source definition is moving away from the free software ideal and the regard of user’s freedoms to use software. In conclusion, Perens was showing that he “tended toward promotion of Free Software rather than Open Source”, because “Eric Raymond seems to be losing his free software focus.” Perens has being mentioned in a number of documents in this reading set, it is interesting how he changed his position between “Free Software” and “Open Source”.

REFERENCE
[1] BSD License
[2] OSV: The Revenge of the Hackers
[3] OSV: The Open Source Definition
[4] Why Open Source Misses the point of Free Software (FSF)
[5] Categories of Free and Non-Free Software (FSF)
[6] Talk about Free Software again (Bruce Perens)