People think Open Source is just about having access to the source code. Actually, there’s a much longer history behind it. Open Source existed before the term Open Source was even coined, back in the late 60s. Universities started giving away software like Unix for free under small licenses like BSD or MIT, coincidentally named after the universities behind them.
But what happened in the mid-80s was that these Unixes weren’t free anymore. Somebody took them and made them proprietary. No access to code, everything closed down. So in the mid-80s, Richard Stallman started a movement called Free Software, trying to liberate this by making a new version of Unix called GNU (GNU is Not Unix). That became successful once Linux was added to the equation, using the GPL license.
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It was called Free Software, it was called Linux, it was called all sorts of things. Then, about 27 years ago, the term Open Source came along. People said, why don’t we call it Open Source? It was catchier and more precise than Free Software, since “free” can be confused with “free of charge” rather than “free as in free speech.” So they settled on Open Source. But then came the question of defining it, and a group of people wrote the Open Source Definition.
Somebody needed to be able to say whether something is Open Source or not, so an initiative was formed by the people behind that definition: the Open Source Initiative. From its inception, that’s been the body that stewards the Open Source Definition and determines what is and isn’t Open Source. The definition itself is about ten rules: you must be able to use the software for any purpose, you can’t discriminate against people or against technology, the source code must be available, and so on. The most relevant part of all this, in terms of copyright, is the license. The Open Source Initiative maintains a list of approved licenses, the Open Source licenses.
Broadly, we promote the concept of Open Source and openness in general. That’s why, when people started talking about Open Source AI, we asked: wait a minute, is this really Open Source? Because it isn’t software, it’s something else. So we started a process to gather opinions and contributions on what Open Source AI actually means. That’s just one example, but the Open Source Initiative is an advocacy group. It’s a relevant, prestigious entity for telling apart what is open and what isn’t, and for educating people on how to tell the difference. We interact with foundations, with governments, to make sure people understand that Open Source isn’t just an empty label. It’s a precise, well-established term of the trade. You can’t abuse the term Open Source, because that would be a sham.
People say Open Source is different from Free Software, but they’re really the same thing seen from two different angles. One way to tell if something is Open Source is to check whether the four freedoms, which go further than the definition itself, are respected: the freedom to use the software, to modify it, to distribute original and modified copies, and to study it. It’s virtually the same idea. Free Software is more of a philosophical approach, and Open Source is more of a practical one.
I think people also don’t realize what a nightmare we’d be living in worldwide if there were no Open Source software, because we’d end up at the mercy of whoever owns the software that runs the world. Fortunately, today Open Source is genuinely successful, and it’s something that needs to be preserved. For instance, when the Cyber Resilience Act was being drafted in the EU, somebody noticed that this would be a disaster for independent Open Source developers, since they’d suddenly become liable for bad software they made without ever getting paid for it.
Luckily, we were ready to raise our hand and point out that most of the software running the world was made by Open Source developers without any money changing hands. It would have been a disaster to apply that liability to Open Source. Fortunately, they recognized the mistake they were about to make, and now there’s an exception for Open Source that isn’t monetized. As soon as you use Open Source for monetary reward, which is entirely legitimate and worthwhile, you become liable for the software you distribute for money, but not for the software you simply make available to everybody. That’s the kind of thing the Open Source Initiative does.
Lean more by listening to Understanding Open Source Law and AI Impacts in Modern Software Development
