BAD recap

[Ben Pfaff]

"Robin Rowe" <rower@MovieEditor.com> writes:

> A separate discussion followed, debating the significance of
> the difference between "free software" and "open source." [...]

Personally, I use the term "free software".  To me, the term
"open source" emphasizes benefits to business.  When I hear
people talk about "open source", I don't hear them talk about
freedom, but for me one of the most important aspects of free
software, perhaps *the* most important aspect, is the freedom.
To summarize: RMS talks about freedom, ESR doesn't, so I use
RMS's term.

This is not the way I have always felt or thought.  When ESR
first proposed the term "open source", I started using it, and
you can still find it in my old writings, e.g.,
        http://www.msu.edu/~pfaffben/writings/anp/oss-is-better.html
But after a while I discovered that I didn't really like the
attitudes I was seeing from some of the commercial vendors as
they brought out their "open source" products, and I was starting
to feel alienated from some of the things that ESR was doing and
saying.  So I started to think about what I really believed, and
discovered that for me "free software" is the correct term.
-- 
"Unix... is not so much a product
 as it is a painstakingly compiled oral history
 of the hacker subculture."
--Neal Stephenson