Background > What does "free" really mean? > Compromises & licenses

Compromises & licenses

Open source is a compromise between the rights of companies and users. The variety of licenses reflects this shifting balance.

Open source is a compromise. Open source encompasses free software but employs a less stringent principle of freedom. All free software is open source, but not vice versa. Richard Stallman explains: "'Free software' and 'Open Source' describe the same category of software, more or less, but say different things about the software, and about values." (sic) (Stallman, in Dibona, p. 70)

Figure: Open source encompasses the idea of free software.

Stallman and others argue that a program and its license represent values and rights. Restrictive end-user licenses protect company rights while free software protects user rights. Open source is a compromise. Unlike the GPL, open source allows a company to lead a community project to create a program, then use the code in a proprietary product. Thus, open source offers the user access to source code while leveraging the resources of companies.

Figure: Open source is a compromise between user rights and company rights.

Open source licenses

The open source movement is lead by the Open Source Initiative (OSI). The OSI formally reviews licenses before certifying them as open source. The GPL is a Certified Open Source license. So are the Apple Public Source License and the Mozilla Public License.

Image: the OSI certification.

The Mozilla license illustrates the key distinction between free software and open source: whether the code can be closed in the future. The Mozilla license allows and encourages modification of the source code. Netscape reserves the right to include those modifications in its proprietary programs (e.g. Netscape 7.0). This is acceptable to the Open Source Initiative, but Stallman and the FSF have objections. They argue that free software should always be free.

This is an emerging issue so the vocabulary is still in flux. For example, the United States government sometimes uses a single category: Free and Open Source Software (FOSS). Others use Free/Libre/Open Source Software (FLOSS). Unfortunately, FOSS and FLOSS blur some key distinctions between price, access, and liberty.

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