poll: free software or open source

[curaga]

I'm also wondering wether this means which kind of software we prefer, or which name for free as in freedom?

[Shakey_Jake33]

I lean slightly towards free. I support a person's right to produce software, and keep the source code for themselves. Sell it, reproduce it, etc. For themselves.

Without individual rights, there is nothing.

If that individual decides they want to open the source of their software for the rest of us, I'll applaud it every single time. But it should be up to an owner to open source, not a bunch of strong arm tactics that force someone to do it against their will.

(AMD/ATI is a good example. We've polled, petitioned, asked, and taken our business somewhere else. But nobody did anything illegal, dangerous, or otherwise highly stupid. AMD/ATI decided to do it on their own. They're my heros of the year) :-)

Doesn't free (as in freedom, libre) software imply open source as a requirement to achieve that? If the user has no right to view and modify the code, it's not free/libre anymore. I'm sure you're refering to BSD-style, but as I understood it, the original open source is free, but if a program is made from that code does not open it's source, it may be obeying the terms of the licence, but it's no longer free/libre by defintion.

My view? They both go hand in hand, and both rely on eachother. I agree the infighting is damaging, and making people loose track of why people of both sides chose to go down the alternate path, and who the 'real' (lack of better term) 'enemy' is, the proprietary world of Microsoft, Apple, Adobe etc.

[derred]

Why does open source have to mean free. I would be willing to pay more for a piece of software that I had the source code to. And as far as companies go, I'm sure they would be thrilled to be able to purchase code to edit as they need.

[deanjo]

And as far as companies go, I'm sure they would be thrilled to be able to purchase code to edit as they need.

There are examples of that in the real world. One that springs to mind is Shake for Linux.