The Term Open Source Doesnt Mean Anything
Eben Moglen has finally been interviewed on how the FSF is approaching the Novell-MS deal.
The most interesting thing was what he had to say about the phrase “open source” and his insights into Microsoft’s subliminal strategy:
“This was the week ‘Open Source’ ceased to be a useful phrase because it denoted everything up to and including Microsoft’s attempts to destroy free. Language is subject to this problem. Since the beginning of time uprising movements have taken pleasure in perverting the language of criticism used against them by the ancien regime - the ‘brave beggars’ of the Netherlands, and Yankee Doodle, and the Whigs and the Tories - it’s all the same terms of dis-endearment turned into a weapon. But the game is also played by modern propaganda in the other direction - by turning lang into the property of the guy on top: Fox News “Fair & Balanced (tm)”. “What Microsoft did to ‘Open Source’ was what Stallman always said could be done to it: first you take the politics out, and when the veal has been bleached absolutely white, you can cover it with any sauce you like. And that’s what Microsoft did, and ‘Open Source’ became the sauce on top of Microsoft proprietarianism. And once that process has been completed they have to go after the next vocabulary.” “So now they’re going to try the hard work of cracking ‘Freedom’. Free, well that means stuff you don’t pay for…” Microsoft had always been very astute in its analysis, we suggested. While the press focused on the open, or distributed nature of the production process, Redmond identified the fact that the GPL was viral as the real attack. “That’s right. They understood the copyleft problem well - and understood the GPL well. But they didn’t want to talk about the enemy because of the rule in American political campaigns that you don’t say the name of your opponent in case people remember it. They don’t do that anymore. They’ve dropped the mask,” he suggested. “What’s happened is that “Open Source” has died as a useful phrase - Free Software, the GPL, the FSF - all have become major stakeholders in the industry in Microsoft’s verbiage. Once you’re a major stakeholder you don’t go back to being a minor stakeholder unless you go bankrupt - and we can never go bankrupt because we have no business to lose. So if we’re major stakeholder. now we stay that way until the end of the chapter, and that’s a problem for Microsoft.”
We can see this directly in interviews with Bill Gates: In January he tried to confuse Free Culture with a No-Payment Culture, and he’s done it again this month.
This also coincides with one of the biggest promoters of “Open Source” - Red Hat and Fedora - heading towards 100% Free Software status.
However, Fedora includes non-free firmware just like Debian continues to, but it is on the right path. It might even one day surpass gNewSense as the best GNU+Linux distribution out there.
The The Term Open Source Doesnt Mean Anything by David Crossland, except the quotations and unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.
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The Debian Project is on the right path and has been walking it longer, starting from a far more difficult place. I welcome these newcomers Fedora and gNewSense to this path and hope that maps become easier to share. Sadly, so far, some in each project are spending time trash-talking the others.
I doubt Debian 5 or 6 are going to remove all non-free firmware, and drop the non-free and contrib repositories. “Never” is a long time, but it might be appropriate to say never given the current culture. Ubuntu is including more and more non-free software, so I can no longer recommend it, and I hope gNewSense grows.