Remember that the Gnu Public License that Stallman devised, and which applies to most of Linux, was created to forestall precisely the sort of hijacking you describe, where there is no legal barrier to folding public domain works into proprietary works, thereby taking advantage of the work of the commons to hold it hostage. The GPL's unfriendliness to proprietary claims lead to the creation of the term Open Source by those who frankly wanted the magic pixie dust of the collaboration without the principled encumberance of free-speech software
[...]
...........
Precisely right.
Immediately after sending my post, I pinched myself for not making this distinction.
A good example of the principle in action is the DD-WRT router firmware I mentioned in a previous post. (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DD-WRT>)
Linksys (among other vendors) embedded GPL'ed code into their routers, sealing it behind a proprietary wall. This GPL violation came to light, creating an opportunity for open-source devs to create enhancements and replacements of factory shipped firmware without fear of legal reprisals. The results have been positive for advanced users of off-the-shelf routers and for hardware vendors too since some have started offering devices with DD-WRT baked in.
Andy wrote (and Ravi seconded):
Stallman bristles at the lumping together of free and open-source software in terms like "FOSS" -- and rightly so, I think, in part because of the difference in their relative resistance to being folded into campaigns such as DRM. He has said quite explicitly that any supposed technical advantages that Free Software has as Open Source Software are in principle secondary: that freedom is what's most important. I think he has a compelling argument, even if his principles are sometimes difficult to adhere to.
.....
Yes.
Ironically, this central political aspect of open-source is often (usually?) overlooked. Typically, the focus is on technical questions of its quality vs. closed-source competitors. I was once the sort of ass tunnel who hand wavingly declares Stallman insane. I had to *mature* into an understanding of what he's getting at. And by 'mature', I don't mean merely grow older and more mellow but over time, watch and learn as Microsoft and Apple and IBM and Sun and their lesser brethren made moves designed to create closed-loop, endless revenue generation systems (which, to repeat myself, is really what DRM is ultimately all about). It has been ever thus; nothing new under the sun and so on. But you have to develop the right political sensory organs to recognise these individual instances of what's generically called 'greed' as manifestations of a larger principle.
Returning to my original point, I believe now, more than ever, that the key benefit of open source software has little to do with performance or even security (though there are certainly examples of solid performance and greater inherent security). The key benefit is that it provides the 'threat of a good example', an alternative, however flawed.
And despite the messy state of software development described by shag, I'm confident that without this 'threat' things might be even worse. Redmond might not have pushed hard to get a better Windows Vista -- aka Windows 7 -- out the door so quickly if it weren't for OS X and Linux. OS X might not be as nice as it is if it weren't for open source development leading the way. Surely, there are other examples.
The point isn't that open source is always and forever technically better, or even that it's leading us to a socialist Nirvana (I share shag's disdain for techno-pollyanna-ism). The point is that we need this example. Computers are, as Joseph Weisenbaum put it, "the Prometheus of machines", present at every stage of our lives whether we actively use them in the 'personal' form or not. Software is one of the most important elements of our lives.
It's important for people to be out there, reminding us -- both with words and programmatic deeds -- that this has political meaning and consequences.
This is what open-source is all about for me. And yes, as Andy (per Stallman) says, FOSS as a term should be tossed. It's no longer state of the art and deeply confuses the issue.
.d.