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Editorial 
Apple in OpenSourceLand
... and Free Software
For you can only be free when even the desire of seeking freedom becomes
a harness to you, and when you cease to speak of freedom as a goal and a
fulfilment.
You shall be freed indeed when your days are not without a care nor your
nights without a want and a grief
But rather when these things girdle your life and yet you rise above
them naked and unbound.
- Kahlil Gibran
It is getting well known that at the base of MacOSX is an open source project which brings
Apple not only in an open source land but also in a free software land. Free software is not anything, it is a philosophy put forth, defined and most of all applied by the GNU Project of which the starting point was a manifesto by Richard M Stallman.
However, that does not make everything clear. There are a few distinctions that must be made first:
- Freeware
- This usually refer to executable programs that can be used at no costs but that do not give access
to the source code.
- Open Source
- The source is available but some have some licensing restrictions.
- Free Software
- Software that comes with permission for anyone to use, copy, and distribute, either verbatim
or with modifications, either gratis or for a fee. In particular,
this means that source code must be available.
You may refer to http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/categories.html for more complete definitions and categories.
The best known way to say it is "Free as in free speech, not free beer".
As a matter of fact, the Apple Public Source License (APSL) was severely criticized by the GNU Project and such comments are a good example of what is at stake :
At a fundamental level, the APSL makes a claim that, if it became
accepted, would stretch copyright powers in a dangerous way: it claims
to be able to set conditions for simply *running* the software. As I
understand it, copyright law in the US does not permit this, except
when encryption or a license manager is used to enforce the
conditions. It would be terribly ironic if a failed attempt at making
a free software license resulted in an extension of the effective
range of copyright power.
Aside from this, we must remember that only part of MacOS is being
released under the APSL. Even if the fatal flaws and practical
problems of the APSL were fixed, even if it were changed into a very
good free software license, that would do no good for the other parts
of MacOS whose source code is not being released at all. We must
not judge all of a company by just part of what they do.
Overall, I think that Apple's action is an example of the effects of
the year-old "open source"
movement: of its plan to appeal to business with the purely
materialistic goal of faster development, while putting aside the
deeper issues of freedom, community, cooperation, and what kind of
society we want to live in.
Apple has grasped perfectly the concept with which "open source" is
promoted, which is "show users the source and they will help you fix
bugs". What Apple has not grasped--or has dismissed--is the spirit of
free software, which is that we form a community to cooperate on the
commons of software.
Now that the background is clear, I have a little point of view that I would like to add to the picture. It is not a matter of proving anyone right or wrong, it is a matter of what is software freedom and this comment by the GNU project "We must not judge all of a company by just part of what they do" is the key.
I think that Apple has always been a paragon in software freedom from another point of view : the user's. The GNU project is something I am very fond of, its principles can be applied to many sectors of mankind's activity with very interesting results. However, they don't mean much to a computer user that does not know how to change his desktop picture and that is where Apple has always been ahead in providing freedom to its users, the freedom to be able to do what they want. My girlfriend for instance (with her permission) was totally lost on her PC, losing documents, not being able to print, needing help for almost everything (the archetypal no-future computer user, she was even convinced that she could crash a system just by looking at it). Since she is running a mac, she is discovering that she can actually do more things than she had thought possible on her own, she is quite proud of this new autonomy. I don't think a GNU/Linux system would do the same for her. Steve Jobs' statements about "fair use" and all the iApps bundled with MacOSX are good examples of where the freedom focus is at Apple.
I don't want to do a switch ad, I just see that GNU and Apple have a completely divergent tradition of freedom. In this perspective, they are not meant to get along soon, but when (or if) they do, then we will be approaching something quite awesome from a technical, a moral, a philosophical and a end-user's point of view (we might even have audio in Darwin !).
Yves de Champlain
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