The distinction has tripped up Apple, Sun Microsystems and, earlier this week, Netscape, among many others. And it begs the question: Just when is software truly open source?
The issue is more than one of semantics. If open source is to develop as a mainstay of computing, supporters say, users must have faith that products entered into the open-source community meet commonly accepted criteria.
Not helping the issue is that the definition of "open source" is somewhat imprecise and constantly subject to refinement. According to the Open Source Initiative, keepers of the official definition, the software must be freely redistributable, allow modification and allow distribution of those modifications.
When a company runs afoul of the commonly accepted open source notion, open source advocates are quick to take them publicly to task.
Netscape on the hot seat
America Online's Netscape subsidiary found itself splitting hairs over the definition of open source earlier this week, as the company inched closer toward making available its first official beta of Netscape Navigator 6.
The Mozilla open source development team that has been shepherding the Netscape 6 code for the past two years attempted to deflect criticism wrought by some open source advocates regarding how open source developers -- and Netscape/Mozilla itself -- will interact with Beta 1, which is due out in mid-April.
"Also, the Mozilla IRC client, an important means by which active Mozilla developers communicate via IRC, is not available in the Netscape product," Baker continued. "So the Netscape beta will not be a release which developers can use to participate in the full range of Mozilla development activities."
Netscape's hardly the only company tangling with the thorny open source definitional issue.
Darwin, the free, open-source OS that Apple rolled out in 1999, inspired debate among open-source advocates. Some developers chafed at restrictions in Apple's initial Public Source License contract, complaining that it was far more restrictive than other open-source licenses. Apple subsequently revised the license.
Sun gets tangled up again
Sun got scorched, too. First, Sun got in trouble when it attempted to claim its Sun Community Source License was roughly equivalent to open source's General Public License. Then, when it unveiled Solaris 8 earlier this year, it pitched its "Free Solaris" program as a way of making Solaris source and binary code more freely available to the developer community.
This week, Sun ran into trouble again -- this time on the Java front. The company postponed plans to announce version 2.0 of the Java Community Process (JCP), after key partners refused to back it. Sun has been working with a "blue ribbon panel" of Java licensees -- including IBM, Novell, Oracle and BEA Systems -- to hammer out a plan it can submit to all licensees. After considering licensees' feedback, Sun planned to post a draft version of the JCP for public review by the end of April.
According to licensees, Sun proposed "generally liberalising" the terms for participation in the JCP. Sun also proposed the "possible formation of an Executive Committee, comprised of major industry stakeholders" that would approve the passage of Java specifications through "key points of the JCP."
But several controversial areas were not addressed: Java licensing, Java branding, and the interaction between Java and open source, among others. A Sun spokeswoman declined to discuss details but said Sun decided to postpone the announcement until it had something substantive to say.
But Sun did learn its lesson on one front. The company seems to have backed off on claiming that its JCP is a standards body, a claim that irked to no end a number of its existing and potential Java partners.
Be: drawing the line
Operating system vendors such as Be are well aware of the need to walk the open source line.
"Our OS is not open source," acknowledges Tim Self, Be vice president of product marketing. "The kernel is ours and only ours. We are using a license very like the FreeBSD license. It lets people take our code, bundle and sell it, but they don't need to give back changes to the open source community."
Be did test the open source waters this week on Tuesday, however, when it announced it would allow "open access" to its desktop interface -- called Tracker -- and its taskbar, Deskbar, by publishing the source code and developers kit for these two components. As promised, Be also made available for free download the Personal Edition of BeOS 5, which it released officially this week.
By opening up these applications, Be will "let people learn the ins and outs of the OS and file system," without actually putting the OS into open source, Self claims. "We're not looking for the world to build these [products] for us. These are shipping applications. We simply want to control some aspects because we think it makes the application development process go faster."
Open source advocates will likely take issue with Be's speed justification, however. One of open source's main claims to fame is the speed at which new features and fixes become incorporated into new versions of products, compared to the speed at which traditional software development shops incorporate such updates.
Additional reporting by Matthew Rothenberg, ZDNet News
