A badly researched Yahoo News piece recently characterized open source developers' reluctance to adopt the new GNU General Public License version 3 as creating "a rift in the open source community between idealists who believe all software should be free of charge and free to use, and pragmatists who want to see open source software make further inroads into commercial use." There are so many things wrong in that statement that I hardly know where to begin. Is it really so difficult to understand this stuff? Yes, there is a rift in the community -- if there is a single, cohesive, unanimous community at all -- but it's not for the reasons listed in this Yahoo story.
I guess I should start with the difference between open source and free software. One is a software design philosophy officially defined and maintained by a licensing cabal; the other is a set of moral values imposed through software licenses defined and maintained by a social/political movement. There has been a natural division between the two since the inception of the Open Source Initiative in 1998. The OSI has little or nothing to do with "seeing open source software make further inroads into commercial use," per the Yahoo author's article. The very first sentence on the OSI Web site is: "Open source is a development method for software that harnesses the power of distributed peer review and transparency of process. The promise of open source is better quality, higher reliability, more flexibility, lower cost, and an end to predatory vendor lock-in." Where does it say there that corporate adoption is a goal? Not that getting more open source software into enterprise-grade businesses wouldn't benefit the OSI or open source software in general, but since when has this been one of the OSI's primary goals?
The Free Software Foundation has vociferously expressed in every possible way over the past 20+ years that the "free" in "free software" has absolutely nothing to do with price. Again: Free software has absolutely nothing to do with price; it is instead a set of moral obligations to provide certain allowances to users and programmers. It takes less than 30 seconds worth of reading on the fsf.org Web site to discover this fact. You'd have to be some kind of moron to make a mistake like this in a professional publication.
Despite the Yahoo author's mistakes, there really is a rift forming over the GPLv3. Indeed the gap between free software-ists and open source-ists is widening with the GPLv3, mainly because of the restrictions it includes. FSF supporters say that the restrictions protect freedom; open source pragmatists say that the restrictions harm the very same freedom, though the OSI has approved GPLv3 as officially "open source." The OSI isn't really a leader in the open source community, despite its name -- all it really does is allow people to use the OSI trademark if their software license conforms to the open source requirements. The real leaders are the people approving patches, writing code, and performing code audits -- they're the ones who truly determine what open source software is and is not.
Anyway, fundamental dichotomies aside, since the June release of GPLv3 I have seen some of the free software moderates defecting to the open source camp, too. With events like Eben Moglen's bizarre tirade against Tim O'Reilly, the FSF leadership (even though Moglen is no longer officially a leader, he still acts as a spokesperson) is appearing more like a group of religious extremists, and less like programmers intent on creating free replacements for proprietary programs. The FSF's focus is increasingly to protest, boycott, censure, and exclude all things it does not find morally agreeable. By contrast, it is the open source community that is doing all the real work -- the coding, the documentation requesting, and the reverse-engineering. The rift is forming primarily between the people who do the talking, and the people who do the actual software development. This has come to mean a rift between free software, which for all its bluster and bombast has failed miserably to produce a complete GNU operating system; and open source, which has produced many financially and/or technologically successful operating systems over virtually the same period of time.
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