Simon Phipps on the Zen of Free

[OPENSTEP]

Simon recently delivered a keynote speech at OSCON (the O'Reilly open source conference). He spoke about the underlying principles and motivation of open source software, and I highly recommend reading the transcript of his speech. It raises many very interesting points and has some incredibly relevant insights:

http://blogs.sun.com/roller/resources/webmink/0630-Zen-Of-Free-OSCON.pdf

One point of historical background is that O'Reilly had recently stated that licenses are irrelevant (can't find link now, but it's a theme that he's been expounding for years). So who's right?

Well, IMHO, both.

Tim's perspective is absolutely right. The majority of users really don't care about licenses at all. The point of "free" is that it's "free as in beer" and they don't have to pay for it. Heck, many users don't even care about commerial closed source licenses adn have no problem pirating Windows or whatever software they want. The average user doesn't care about the license, they just want the software they're trying to get.

Simon's perspective is also totally absolutely correct. Developers care a lot about licenses since that's what legally governs their code and forms a basis for how others can integrate with their project. It's the license that sets the stage for the overall evolution of a project, especially if you're making something like a library or a standard that's intended primarily for use by other developers (which a lot of open source software is).

Beyond that, I find the discussion of governance issues much more intriguting given the recent banter I've been involved in here

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