Transcript

Bruce Perens: Hi there! This is Bruce Perens and I have Shane Coughlan from the Free Software Foundation.

Shane Coughlan: Hello everyone!

Bruce Perens: And we wanted to talk about Free Software and Open Source, because this has been a problem for about 10 years. I’m going to say what I think about it and then I think Shane can tear me to pieces.

When we started the Open Source Initiative, obviously Free Software was there. We were standing on Richard Stallman’s shoulders, and Richard is someone I aOpen Sourcedmire tremendously. Open Source and Free Software, in my opinion, are two ways of talking about the same thing. One of them emphasises your freedom, and it plays really well to technical people, to philosophers and maybe to some kinds of politicians. Open Source plays really well to business people who haven’t “bought in” to the philosophy yet.

What I think is important about Open Source is, it lets people get into it and then, once they understand the benefits, they start to realise, “Hey, that Stallman guy is right, and I’ve got a lot to learn from him!” So this is like, “give them a gentle introduction and eventually they will get to appreciate their freedom”. Whereas I feel, sometimes, if we start by asking them a priori to approach this from a “freedom” perspective instead of a "practical" perspective, some of them will never come to the party. So what do you think about that?

Shane Coughlan: (Laughs) Thanks, Bruce! Well, just for context everyone, my name is Shane Coughlan and I’m the legal co-ordinator of Free Software Foundation Europe.

I think it’s really interesting that we had a situation in 1998 where Free Software was just getting to the point where there was a huge value for all types of market participants. As I understand it, the conceptualisation with the initial Open Source idea was using the term, in a way, as a marketing method to present the ideas (or some parts of the ideas) to the management. And certainly, in terms of numbers, it’s been incredibly successful: the market penetration of that term is phenomenal!

The perspective from an organisation like FSFE is that we want “freedom” to be the top thing we talk about, because we think that having the freedoms to use, study, share and improve are imperative to making the most from software. The concern I have sometimes about a term like Open Source is based around ensuring that people understand the scope of freedom granted. And, as you said, people tend to come around and look at all the questions and come to understand Free Software fully in the end. So, in market practice, I think Free Software is doing fine, though I worry sometimes that if people end up focussing on source code alone, they might miss some of the abilities they get with Free Software.

In Europe, it’s been fascinating, because I would suggest that the term Free Software is more automatically compatible with our political systems and our business systems here...especially when you talk about “social benefit”, because a lot of us here are social democracies with a very strong governmental mandate to benefit all citizens. So the terms fit well into the idea of social democratic structure. But on the business sphere, on the pure economic sphere, again it was the term Open Source which had deep market penetration.

Nowadays, what’s interesting is that people who were focussing on a term like Open Source and focussing purely on a developmental methodology approach, are now also asking questions about broader-scope freedoms. So I’m guessing that what we see is that the paradigm works really well, the over arching concept of doing all these things with software is great, and that people might start participating for one reason or two reasons or a limited scope of reasons, but they end up over time asking, “What are the bigger things?” Would you agree with that, Bruce?

Bruce Perens: Well, I think the bigger things are really important! What I’ve found is that most people who actually deal with Open Source understand that Open Source has licences and that Open Source does come with particular freedoms.

One of the questions is really, “What if it just has source code and no other rights, what do you call it?” Microsoft did this great favour to us and created Shared Source - you may have freedoms there, but you never know which one it is from one product to the next. But, I actually recommend the words “disclosed source code”.

Disclosed source code is what you would have, for example, in a voting machine if you had a good organization for having an electronic voting machine. Obviously, you don’t want to have that voting machine have the software that somebody just loaded into it when they were in the booth. You want it to have software that’s been very carefully audited. But you also want that software to be disclosed, so that people can look at it for flaws and make sure there aren’t any. So there’s a case where just plain disclosure makes sense.

Now, when I wrote the Open Source definition, I did it with the help of many people in the Debian project. It was actually the Debian Free Software guidelines, and we worked on it for a whole month. It only became the Open Source definition months later. It had been approved, it had been voted upon. And I sent that off to Richard, and Richard said, “Well, this is a good definition of Free Software!” So what I feel is that we really use the same licenses for Free Software and Open Source. There are some very small differences, and I think that differences may have happened more for differentiation between the two campaigns than anything else.

I think it really is a difference in marketing. Suppose you’re selling vacuum cleaners. Well, sometimes you want to tell people, “this is cheap”, because they have a limited budget, and sometimes you want to tell people “this will clean well”, because that’s their biggest priority. So, what we’re really talking about is tailoring the message to the audience.

Now, there’s something that Open Source got wrong about tailoring the message. Early in the days of Free Software, one of the important (at that time) players felt that Richard Stallman personally would scare business people. He had long hair, he had a beard, he had weird ideas. So it was felt that we just didn’t want to ever present him and because of that – and I never agreed with this and it hurt me actually quite a lot – it was felt by some people that Richard should be deprecated, should be hidden from the business people, and that Open Source would surmount and replace the Free Software campaign. That was a mistake, and the most important thing about that is that it’s over. So we are talking about the same thing when we say Open Source and Free Software.

Shane Coughlan: Yeah, I think that’s a really good point, Bruce. Well, we’ve gone way past the stage where there’s scope – how shall I put it – scope for describing things as inherently separate entities, that we need to have different movements. What we’re looking at are a bunch of people working on a terrific value proposition in Free Software( or whatever term you use at the time) with these licenses. What they grant you is an incredible thing, and there are lot of participants that can work together, and do work together, in practical ways.

I guess the important questions we have now, and in the future, are: How do we make sure that the grants are maintained, that the licenses work, that we are able to manage this in a sustainable way for the future, and not to regard personality conflicts as a driving force in how we determine our strategic future as a movement. And it’s a very interesting situation now, because we’ve really matured in ten years. I think it’s phenomenal how far we’ve come in ten years!

I’m curious to see what happens with the next generation of kids coming up. Maybe they’ve only got awareness that “it’s called Linux...whatever!” I hope we’ll have a good framework in place to educate them why there’s something really important here. Use, study, share, improve, have copyleft...there’s reasons! And that we’re going to be able to pass the knowledge and experience, not repeat conflicts, not repeat misunderstandings or personalities, and to take all the great stuff, like market penetration that happened from 1998, take the cool stuff like the foundation and philosophy and society from the Free Software Foundation, and pass that on to the next generations. And not have tie-ups about the growing pains we had as an overarching movement. Would you agree that’s kind of a good direction?

Bruce Perens: Well, revolutions eat their children! And this is the important thing: they always have people with very strong wills, people who are personally fascinating, leading them. Richard Stallman is that kind of person. I have been in the room when Richard has met a head of state and have seen just how honoured Richard is by that kind of person. It’s very impressive!

Obviously, getting Richard to let go is very difficult because Richard sees that there are a lot of things wrong in the world, and that there are a lot of problems in the way people are accepting only half of what we are talking about sometimes. And Richard has made this the purpose of his entire life. Which I have not – I’m a parent, I have a wife, I have a wonderful son, I have a life other than Free Software. Richard, in contrast, devotes his entire life to this and must be honoured because of that. Just handing the baton on is something that’s very hard for him.

And it’s hard for me too, because I see there are a lot of things wrong that I would like to fix, and what I’m trying to do to fix them is not just to be an open-source evangelist, but to enter, more seriously, general-purpose politics. Because you’re a technical guy, you understand this philosophy, you understand what’s at stake, where we have a really important mission in supporting democracy and in having an infrastructure that is fair, that no one owns, that will be the path that you get news. And, of course, the way you get news is how you vote. Who understands this in Parliament? Who understands this in Congress? Why are there so few technical people in there?

Shane Coughlan: That’s a good point. I agree. We’re in an unfortunate situation where techies are still remote from everyday society and in politics, there isn’t a good set of technical experts that talk to high-level politicians.

On the Richard front, I think it’s imperative for Free Software that there was someone who kept saying, “its the freedoms, guys, stick with it!” And goodness knows, the agenda could have got twisted badly by people who only had an interest in the aspect, but not the complete picture.

What I’m hoping is that people will be able to read essays and speeches by speakers like Richard Stallman in the future, and to keep on message with the core. Because even if they’re only using Free Software because they can distribute their development, the value there happens because Free Software is much more than that. That’s why we have all of these participants and ultimately we’re going to have to keep people understanding that it’s not just cherry-picking the bits of Free Software you like; the ecosystem, the entire grouping, depends on the whole. And that’s why I think Richard’s message is really cool. I’m very glad that he’s written so many essays and books. And there are a lot of other thinkers – your essays and work too provide a great educational foundation, as long we keep putting the new guys over to look at it.

Politics - I hope you do something there, because I think we’re desperately lacking techies. On the European front, it’s going to be a few years, I think, before we can get all 27 nations to agree on anything...but we’ll get there too!

Bruce Perens: So I wanted to bring up Creative Commons, because obviously it’s not just software any more; we have open hardware, we have Creative Commons. I published a series of 24 books with Prentice-Hall PTR - they were Open Source books, their license complied with the Open Source definition, you knew what rights you were getting there.

My problem with Creative Commons is: what rights are you getting? Across the board, I think, you get the rights to distribute (not necessarily for profit) and you get the right to read...and those are the only rights you get. You don’t get, across the board, the right to modify, the right to create derivative works, etc. So is Creative Commons helping us or hindering us, by having this one name that applies to such a broad spectrum of different rights?

Shane Coughlan: Wow, that’s a really good question! And I think it’s a good question because with the Free Software movement, we never faced it. We always were starting from the broadest possible spectrum and saying, “that’s our goal, don’t reduce it!”

Creative Commons is not a license, it’s not a grant, it’s a family. And I think it’s difficult sometimes to explain to people who aren’t lawyers, who aren’t interested in the law, that. Because I’ve noticed in practice, most people assume that Creative Commons equals the Attribution-Share Alike license, which is fully in tune with Free Software.

I think unless we can increase people’s education about legal approaches, there’s potential for confusion. I get worried that people can get confused, and there are ramifications to that. Like someone put up pictures and then Virgin Mobile in the US used them in an advertising campaign. And this person was saying, “Well, Virgin’s making money out of my pictures, what’s going on, I never intended that”. And Virgin was perfectly within their rights, according to the license the person chose.

Licensing is hard. We need good guidelines. In Free Software, we have fantastic outline documents. In documentation, things like Creative Commons, I think we still need work to help people understand the scope of grants. And maybe we need to reduce complexity. Is it really necessary to have that type of scale under one banner? Maybe some people think it is. I think there is potential for confusion. Do you think in the US, the situation is worse than Europe, or is it kind of the same?

Bruce Perens: Well, I think we do have some guidelines problem because, going back to software, I get people who write me and say, ”I’m really disgruntled because people used my software in their product, they didn’t give anything back, they don’t distribute source code.” And I said, “OK, what license are you using?” “BSD.” “Well, yeah, you gave them the right to do that.” “I used BSD because I thought it was more free.” There is a lot of not going through what is it that you’re giving out, and what is it that you expect back.

The other thing that I find with licensing is that people in general perceive licensing from the perspective of the person receiving the license. BSD is often preferred, because if you receive the license, you have the ultimate number of rights - almost every right, except the right to remove an attribution from somewhere no one will ever look anyway. And, on the other hand, GPL from the perspective of someone who is giving out the software is often much better, because it allows that person to have software that is set up to grow. My GPL software has become five times the size of what I wrote, because of that, and all of it was done by companies and put back in the public.

So for business, especially for a business that might want to use dual-licensing, GPL is a really great business tool. And people don’t realize it because they only think about receiving a license, and they don’t think about, “Well, what does this license do to the person who wrote the work and is giving it out?”

Shane Coughlan: Right. Indeed. Parul Veilter was talking about this in the context of the embedded industry earlier. People look at Free Software and think, that’s a great idea to cut licensing costs. And they completely miss the scope of the value proposition.

It’s a big issue that people don’t think about it as much. But it’s changing. In my experience, in Europe at least, more people are beginning to think, “Well, actually, the GPL means that we all work together instead of having ‘bring to market, lose it, bring to market, lose it’...it’s a better value proposition.” And people are realizing that here.

Though, there are also irrational concerns that don’t fit into the licenses. People sometimes imply concerns suggesting that they will lose control of their products; that they will have security problems; that they will have liability problems with terms like “trade secrets” and “patents”. People sometimes bring fears to the Free Software area, that don’t really belong there, at least in my experience in Europe. Sometimes people are worried for reasons that are not relevant to what they’re doing in practice. Have you ever had that experience?

Bruce Perens: Yeah. I do a lot of work with companies that are participating in Open Source and Free Software, and they all come with their own concerns. Every lawyer has their own flavour. And, very often, they don’t realise that some of the more restrictive licences actually solve the problems for them.

A big concern is, “What is to prevent my competitor from running away with this if I release it?” And GPL, and even a thorough GPL, are just excellent tools around that, because they say to your competitor, “Here’s the stuff, be my partner or don’t participate.” It takes a company that might be your competitor and, very often, makes them your best partner in the development of something. There’s an economic perspective to that, which is that the software you are both developing is not the software that differentiates one company from the other. It’s the software that you both need to do a job.

Consider, for example, Amazon.com. Amazon has Web servers, and they have operating systems, and those things are Free Software. Amazon also has a recommendations system, and it says, “People who bought this book also bought...” and it data-mines some other number of books. There have been a number of cases over whether that’s actually their invention or someone else’s. But, the important part is that, while Amazon could tell Bertelsmann and Barnes & Noble everything about Linux and about Apache and about OpenOffice, if they gave them this recommendations system, they would be losing something that makes the difference between Amazon.com and other businesses.

If you have a kind of business that can’t go 100% free, you can really define what parts can be free and what parts can’t, just by looking at where’s the business differentiation, where’s the value for your business, and where’s all the stuff that’s a commodity. And what you find is that 95% of the software in any business belongs in that commodity space, and there’s a very little piece that would actually be called “differentiating innovation”.

Well, thanks very much for talking with me today!

Shane Coughlan: My pleasure. Thank you very much, Bruce!