I'd like to clarify a bit more around the Free Software Movement, the Open Source Movement, and BSD licensing. You said that "RMS (Richard M Stallman) who invented the GPL wants all software to be free (freedom-ware) as his ultimate goal. A computer program is a series of zeros and ones (binary digits), and therefore it is a number. Who would think of copyrighting numbers in mathematics? So he and his followers measure success by the proportion of software that is freedom-ware and exclude BSD-style licences from that calculation."
I have recently finished corresponding with Mr. Stallman for a textbook chapter I'm writing, and I think such a description does him and the Free Software Movement a disservice in its ethical and political aims.
For an upcoming text, I wrote about this:
"Why is public access to source code so important? It is because technology has become an essential tool for progress on so many fronts and the Internet has played a significant role in the democratization of information. C. DiBona, Ockman, and Stone (1992) illustrate this importance with the following analogy:
Imagine for a moment if Newton had withheld his laws of motion, and instead gone into business as a defense contractor to artillerists following the 30 Years War. "No, I won't tell you how I know about parabolic trajectories, but I'll calibrate your guns for a fee." The very idea, of course, sounds absurd. (p. 11)
Stallman believes this analogy doesn’t go far enough: “[It’s] is an understatement. Compared with software in 2000, physics in 1700 had a very small role in affecting people's lives” (personal communication, September 11, 2006 12:58 PM). " (Hengstler & Rees, in press)
The issue of proprietary commercial software versus open source and free software (what I now call freely sourced) has a cultural context. When you review the history of the Free Software Movement, you follow a cultural history where program development was a collective, shared, intellectual activity of programmers--much as the scientific model--prior to the rise of a proprietary approach to software in the late 1970s and following:"As Williams (2002) points out, for members of the younger generation of programmers, proprietary programs have always been part of the landscape:
…grown up in a world of proprietary software. Unless a program was clearly inferior, most saw little reason to rail against a program on licensing issues alone. Somewhere in the universe of free software systems lurked a program that hackers might someday turn into a free software alternative…Until then, why begrudge..[a company] the initiative of developing the program and reserving the rights to it? (chap. 11)
Ultimately, such a philosophical disconnect would cause tensions in the hacker communities." (Hengstler & Rees, in press)
Here is an excerpt from the conclusion of the chapter section detailing the issue of terminology (free software or open source):
"As the commercialization-proprietarization of programming in the 1980s divided hackers, the 1990s saw the freely sourced communities begin to divide around the terms and concepts of free software and open source. While the meaning of “free” could be confusing, the implication for the philosophy of the movement has been popularized by the phrase, “‘free'’ as in ‘free speech,’ not as in ‘free beer’” ((Free Software Foundation, Inc., 2004).Stallman continued his strong ethical stance for maintaining the terminology of free to emphasize the implied freedoms. Stallman also continued his campaign against proprietary software of any type. At the same time in the freely sourced communities, there was a growing faction seeking to ally with commercial players in the interests of wooing them to freely source their proprietary products—as happened with Netscape—and to avoid ethical implications in their work. Add to this, Stallman’s past confrontational history with proprietary agents and Raymond’s highly public portrayal of Torvalds’ and Stallman’s divergent development styles and you have a recipe for community polarization.
An undeniable fact of the Free Software Movement is that that free software is an issue more than price with an attendant value system. This affects its popular appeal when contrasted with the Open Source Movement. While a portion of the population does make conscious choices based on values, there is a large segment which avoids self-examination. Instead, their choices are guided by expediency and price point. From the perspective of price point and expediency, the value system of free software can be an extra feature some are not willing to contemplate as a conscious choice; thus, open source provides an alternative. The division is very similar to the difference between megastore marketing strategies (e.g. Walmart-like) and green/socially conscious marketing strategies. Perhaps, Stallman (2004) sums this up best when he speaks of “an "economistic" approach to all these issues, and economics, as it often does, operates as a .. [vehicle] for unexamined values.”
Without a doubt, terminology continues to be fuzzy and problematic. As Stallman said, “In nearly all cases, the software which is called ‘free’ is also open source, and the software which is called ‘open source’ is also free (though there are occasional exceptions to the latter). The difference is a mainly matter of the philosophy that the speaker endorses” (personal communication, September 10, 2006 6:05 AM). If as Stallman and the FSF contend, the name is reflective of values, the question is whose values—the values of the original programmers of software, the values of the contributors, distributors, or end-users? While a programmer might make a political statement by calling a work free software ala Stallman, if others do not share that value system may they be equally justified in calling it open source as they use it or expand it—or would they be bound by the preceding intentions? Clearly, literal terms can only take us so far." (Hengstler & Rees , 2006, in press)
Here's an excerpt on the history on the BSD licensing as well:
"So it was in June 1989, Berkeley distributed Networking Release 1, “the first freely-redistributable [BSD] code from Berkeley” (McKusick, 1999, p. 7). The licensing for Networking Release 1 would provide one of the earliest examples of freely sourced licensing. Under the terms of the contract,
A licensee could release the code modified or unmodified in source or binary form with no accounting or royalties to Berkeley. The only requirements were that the copyright notices in the source file be left intact and that products that incorporated the code indicate in their documentation that the product contained code from the University of California and its contributors. Although Berkeley charged a $1,000 fee to get a tape, anyone was free to get a copy from anyone who already had received it. Indeed, several large sites put it up for anonymous ftp shortly after it was released. Given that it was so easily available, the CSRG [Fabry’s Computer Systems Research Group at Berkeley] was pleased that several hundred organizations purchased copies, since their fees helped fund further development. (McKusick, 1999, p. 7)
In contrast to copyright, the copyleft approach that would surface in Stallman's (1985a; 1985b) GNU Manifesto and 1989 General Public License (GPL) (Free Software Foundation, Inc.), the BSD license and its successors have become known as examples of “copycenter”. While copyright secures the proprietary nature of the work and copyleft obligates any subsidiary or ancillary work to include the rights to redistribute and copy, copycenter falls in between. Copycenter licenses effectively put the licensed work in the public domain for people to do with it as they would. While the BSD license was implemented about the same time as GPL, Stallman stated, “…it had no effect on the GNU GPL. Its only effect on the GNU Project was that it made some free software available that we could use” (Stallman, R. M., personal communication, September 17, 2006 2:04 PM)." "(Hengstler & Rees, in press)
BSD provided a platform to launch a series of businesses.
Julia Hengstler