The IRS BOLO lists [1] are scanned bitmap PDFs, which make them extremely hard to search. Does anyone know if they also BOLOed Free Software, or was it just Open Source?
The reason I ask is that the term "open source" was designed to be more palatable to businesses. In Revolution OS, Eric S. Raymond said in regard to saying open source over free software: "If you walk in to an executive's office and say 'Free Software', OK, If you're lucky, the response you'll get is something like, 'hmm, hmm, Free Software, must be
cheap, shoddy, worthless.' If you're not lucky, it has associations with the Free Software Foundation's wholesale attack on intellectual property rights, which regardless of what you think about the ethics of that, it's lousy marketing, it's not something that businesses want to hear" [2].
I don't know how savvy the IRS was about the nuances between open source and free software (probably not very), but if they were, they might be making a somewhat-reasonable distinction that "open source" was designed specifically to please the business sector rather than free software's focus on ethics and freedom.
+1 good point. If I were the IRS, organizations producing GPL (or AGPL) licensed software would look more like an educational 501(c)(3) entity than those producing software under Apache or MIT type licenses.
I am not saying I like one license type more than the other (I use both GPL and Apache, depending on the project).
That's possibly relevant to what should appear on the BOLO list. It doesn't seem relevant to what does appear on the BOLO list, or whether one could avoid flagging by using the other term.
In your blog post, you argue that since the two terms result in (mostly) the same output/outcome, the two terms are synonymous. However, according to FSF's open-source/free-software overlap diagram [1], tivoized programs are open source but nonfree, meaning that there is a difference between the outcome of the two terms.
More importantly, that difference is actually a big reflection of the underlying philosophy between the two terms. Free software is about maintaining the Four Freedoms (making tivoization a damaging loophole in the GPL), while open source is about arguing that the bazaar model is superior technically in order to sell it to business (and therefore tivoization is actually a plus to them). I believe this difference in intent should be noteworthy to the IRS in terms of evaluating whether a company is creating a nonprofit for tax-free software development as a form of corporate welfare.
Comments
The IRS BOLO lists [1] are scanned bitmap PDFs, which make them extremely hard to search. Does anyone know if they also BOLOed Free Software, or was it just Open Source?
The reason I ask is that the term "open source" was designed to be more palatable to businesses. In Revolution OS, Eric S. Raymond said in regard to saying open source over free software: "If you walk in to an executive's office and say 'Free Software', OK, If you're lucky, the response you'll get is something like, 'hmm, hmm, Free Software, must be cheap, shoddy, worthless.' If you're not lucky, it has associations with the Free Software Foundation's wholesale attack on intellectual property rights, which regardless of what you think about the ethics of that, it's lousy marketing, it's not something that businesses want to hear" [2].
I don't know how savvy the IRS was about the nuances between open source and free software (probably not very), but if they were, they might be making a somewhat-reasonable distinction that "open source" was designed specifically to please the business sector rather than free software's focus on ethics and freedom.
[1]: http://democrats.waysandmeans.house.gov/press-release/new-ir... [2]: http://www.cswap.com/2001/Revolution_OS/cap/en/25fps/a/00_54
+1 good point. If I were the IRS, organizations producing GPL (or AGPL) licensed software would look more like an educational 501(c)(3) entity than those producing software under Apache or MIT type licenses.
I am not saying I like one license type more than the other (I use both GPL and Apache, depending on the project).
These two are synonyms:
http://jordi.inversethought.com/blog/5-things-we-have-forgot...
That's possibly relevant to what should appear on the BOLO list. It doesn't seem relevant to what does appear on the BOLO list, or whether one could avoid flagging by using the other term.
In your blog post, you argue that since the two terms result in (mostly) the same output/outcome, the two terms are synonymous. However, according to FSF's open-source/free-software overlap diagram [1], tivoized programs are open source but nonfree, meaning that there is a difference between the outcome of the two terms.
More importantly, that difference is actually a big reflection of the underlying philosophy between the two terms. Free software is about maintaining the Four Freedoms (making tivoization a damaging loophole in the GPL), while open source is about arguing that the bazaar model is superior technically in order to sell it to business (and therefore tivoization is actually a plus to them). I believe this difference in intent should be noteworthy to the IRS in terms of evaluating whether a company is creating a nonprofit for tax-free software development as a form of corporate welfare.
[1]: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-open-overlap.html