Tag: Free Software

The NIOSC open day was interesting. The attendees were from a range of very different backgrounds, so it wasn’t easy to find the correct balance between tech-talk and lay-speak.

I presented the "Free Software is the Future" keynote address. Of course, I know nothing about the future. The title was something I said in 1996. The current worldwide Open Source buzz is confirming my predictions, although I hadn’t expected the bizarre name change.

Karen spent most of the day sitting at the combined Kasei and Belfast.pm table. This merged with the BLUG table, where Russell and Scott had setup some demo machines that looked slightly impressive until Macinni put up a real exhibit beside them.

The Northern Ireland Open Source Community is having an open day on Wednesday 16 April, so I’m busy finishing some presentations for that.

After that I have to finish my tutorials for the O’Reilly Open Source Convention in Portland, Oregon

Postfix is my favourite MTA for reasons I’ll not go into at the moment. It’s much better than sendmail.

Recently there has been yet another sendmail vulnerability, but I didn’t care because I use Postfix. Wietse Venema, the author of Postfix, did care. He could have said "sendmail sucks; use Postfix", but instead he wrote a patch for Postfix to remove the sendmail exploit from messages before they reach sendmail. Kudos.

Karen and I were sitting in the BMI lounge in Belfast reading an Internet magazine that described XML as “an open source language”. This annoyed me more than I expected, possibly due to my lack of sleep. “Stallman is right” I said.

The Open Source movement was started to ‘rebrand’ Free Software to make it more acceptable to business and give it a name that was less open to confusion. “‘Free’ is frequently misunderstood to refer to price and not freedom” was their complaint, so they choose what they thought to be a less ambiguous name: “Open Source”. RMS didn’t like this because it stopped people talking about freedom.

“Open Source” has turned out to be much more open to misinterpretation and misuse than “Free Software”: many people, including the authors of the article that sparked this rant, believe that something is open source if you can read the source code. Yes, “Free Software” was slightly ambiguous (in English; the translations in most other languages were not ambiguous at all), but the term could be simply clarified with phrases “Free as in ‘speech’, not ‘beer'”; “Open Source” is much more difficult to explain.

So, again I say “Stallman is right!”. He may be a fanatic, but without him we probably wouldn’t have Free Software by any name. He takes a lot of abuse for wanting us to talk about “Free Software” instead of “Open Source”, and asking us to accurately describe our favourite OS as “GNU/Linux” instead of just “Linux”. If RMS annoys you, good: he’s doing his job. RMS, keep up the good work!

After Peru leading the way and some mumbling in the EU, it seems the UK has finally woken up and produced an Open Source policy. This is good news for everyone, even those who want to be locked into proprietary software.

Hopefully those of us who have been working with Free Software from before it was called Open Source will benefit.