Over the past week, Tim Lee, the always fun Enigma_Foundry, and I have been having a really interesting discussion on the GPL, Free Software and Open Source. While the discussion had its ups and downs, I think it veered into a really interesting topic as we started discussing the concept of "freedom" itself.
In the comments of the same Allison Randall piece I mentioned in my earlier post, Allison gives a really helpful description of the different views of freedom represented by the GPL and BSD licenses:
I was interviewed by a Harvard research group a couple weeks ago, and in trying to explain the difference between the BSD and GPL I came up with a simple way of explaining it. They’re both concerned with software freedom, but each puts more weight on one specific aspect of software freedom. The BSD license puts more weight on freedom of use, while the GPL puts more weight on freedom of access. As a result, each sacrifices on the aspect of software freedom that the other considers most important. The BSD license loses a bit on the side of freedom of access, since it doesn’t require people to release their changes, but depends on their good will to grant access. The GPL loses a bit on the side of freedom of use, since requiring people to release their changes constrains some of the environments where they might use it. There’s room for both philosophies in the pursuit of software freedom.
We can all debate which view of freedom is best, but I think Allison provides really concise description of the two philosophies.