Archive for May 15th, 2009



Open vs. Free : The Battle Over IT Semantics

May 15th, 2009 by Erin Posted in Technology | No Comments »

I’ve seen this question a lot in IT chat rooms -  Is free software the same as open source?

The responses are usually varied,  yet none of them offer a definitive answer.

Curious myself, I Googled to find the answer which led me to one enlightening blog post on the matter at InformationWeek.

The title: You Say Open, I Say Free … Let’s Call The Whole Thing Off 

Now c’mon… that’s funny.

The author, Serdar Yelgulalp, addresses this vocabulary war by sounding off on the context with which these labels are used.

Is a vendor that offers both an open source and a commercially-licensed edition of a product an “open source vendor?”  Some would argue no. They would say OSD refers to the software itself – not the vendor or the business strategy.

On the other hand, some say that vendors with hybrid licensing models could be called “open source vendors” depending on their licensing terms and agreements.

So there you have it.

Still no definitive answer – yet a mighty entertaining dialogue.

In the end, I would have to agree with Yelgulalp.

Does all this even matter? Why should we care how the software was developed or licensed? The focus should be on whether the product is any good.

Still though, some of this petty semantic stuff is worthy of a good think – and a laugh.

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