Free Software and Open Source
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The more I learn about Free Software the more I see the line between "Free Software" and "Open Source". I don't want to start a flame-ware but
The linux kernel is "Open source".
linux-libre is "Free Software", it's the GNU version of Linux.
Emacs is "Free Software"
Vim is "Open Source"
Red Hat Enterprise Linux is "Open Source" , Trisquel is "Free Software" .
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.en.html
But yes, the linux kernel is open source. It's not bad or good, but this is another group.
If you mean some philosophies behind the projects you may be right. Linus Torvalds, for a random example, doesn't seem to believe in software freedom based on interviews and the things he's said over the years. So he'd certainly fall into the more practical "open source because it's technically better" camp. At the same time, within each of the projects, you'll likely find contributors from both philosophical "sides" so that seems to make a generalization such as this hard to do beyond, say, the project founders.
Torvalds: "Think of me as the engineer, RMS as the great philosopher."
Also:"GNU is 'justified' if you make your own distribution, you get to name it; as a name for the system it's just ridiculous."
The name "GNU" served a specific purpose at the time. Anyone who copied any part of any unix was guaranteed to spend the rest of their miserable life in court battling a never-ending flurry of lawsuits.
By baking "GNU is not unix" into the name itself, Stallman set the example for all future GNU coding. You can NOT just steal a useful looking snippet of unix code and repurposed it. Doing so would have meant the death of the entire project.
If you have to remind everyone constantly by giving the project a name that they absolutely hate, then that's what you do.
Another link.
They really have two distinct visions.
A lot of people do computing by using both, Free, and Open Source software and don't realize it. It's completely two different visions.
Stallman saw GNU + the missing part, the kernel. GNU (bash, coreutils, grub, emacs, gdb, gcc, grep, ed, wget, tar, etc) + the Linux kernel = GNU / Linux or GNU + Linux.
In the point of view of Stallman, gcc is not a tool. It is a part of the GNU system. Emacs is not a tool, it is the editor of the GNU system, etc. When you think about that, it's amazing. Linux is only the missing kernel of the GNU operating system. Know you have linux-libre. They started the GNU system in 1984 and in 1991 the missing part for the complete operating system was the kernel. Linux appear and, combining the GNU operating system + the Linux kernel formed a complete operating system. GNU/Linux. People call that wrongly "Linux".
Trisquel, guix, parabola, are a derivation of the complete GNU operating system.
ok ok I diverge ;-) Well, it's like that I understand, maybe I'm completely wrong.
You can build linux and use it with non gnu tools. Like Android. It's Open Source. (of course you can do Open Source with GNU tools too. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is Open Source)
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