Squeegie and I have written a number of articles on the topic of the economics of open source. One thing that I think neither of us has directly addressed is that there is a great deal of disagreement about the use of the terms “Open Source (OS),” “Open Source Software (OSS),” “Free Open Source Software (FOSS),” “Free/Libre/Open Source Software (FLOSS),” and “Doesnt Everyone Notice That Acronyms get Longer Free/Libre/Open Source Software (DENTAL FLOSS),” etc. Our good friend Richard Stallman (also known as RMS) has been militantly vocal about distinguishing between these terms over the years (then again, RMS has been known to be… eccentric). Originally, there was little confusion over the terms; Open Source refered to projects such as GNU, Linux, and Apache. As companies sprang up to profit from open source software, and as licenses appeared that were incompatible with the GPL, there arose a need to distinguish between these various classifications. Generally, people simply lump all of them together under the category of “Open Source”.

Richard stallman makes a distinguishment between the ambiguous english word “free” in terms of “libre” and “gratis”. Projects such as GNU, Linux, and Apache fall under the libre and gratis classifications. However, other projects such as Mandrake Linux and Red Hat Linux are more appropriately classified simply as libre, since they are not truly gratis. This, however, is simply my opinion. The way I see it, Mandrake Linux is not gratis because it has a business model. In contrast, GNU has no business model. Neither does Linux. Both are offered gratis to the community, with only donations (personal and corporate) keeping them going.

So all of a sudden, alot of things make more sense to me. The Open/Closed source software argument is not really one argument. It’s actually two arguments. The first is the libre argument. Should I be free to view the source of a program and make changes as I see fit? The second argument is the gratis argument. Should software always be available without payment? Most people get these two arguments mixed up.

The first argument is a very practical and software oriented question. Should I be allowed access to the source of the software I buy? Should I be allowed to change said source? One obvious answer is that if I am allowed to see the source of commercial software, I can easily pirate this software. As a counterpoint, many would argue that protection mechanisms should not be present in software anyway. In a sense, this shows that the two independant arguments are not completely independent (further adding to the confusion). Another aspect of this question that is often discussed is security. Many security experts consider code to be secure only if the source is available to be scrutinzed, so that it’s security is not based merely on a trust of the company that wrote it. This argument has alot of credence, embodied in the oft heard saying “Obscurity is not security.” However, on a more business oriented level, if I can see the source code to a piece of commercial software, there is little to stop me from writing my own version at greatly reduced cost, and sell a competing version of the software.

This leads into the second argument. Should all software be provided free of charge? This is really an economic question. If, as I stated in my previous article, software was provided with no monetary incentive to the programmers, they will only write code that is useful or interesting to them personally. The difference between Mandrake Linux and Microsoft Windows is not a question of one being free and another costing money. The question is one of business models. This has been another point of confusion. For anyone to argue that one business model is superior over another business model (say, the service oriented contract of Mandrake vs. the up-front cost of Windows), they are claiming that they understand what will maximize a company’s profit better than the company does. This could be true of course, but in most cases, it’s probably not.

I think discussions of Free/Not-Free software would be much more coherent if people simply used the term Libre Software and Gratis Software. Of course, then there are confusions in what defines Libre Software, but at least it’s making progress.