My criticism of the Debian installer in the slink-and-a-half release passed out at LinuxWorld Expo drew a lot of fire from the Debian faithful. I stand by what I wrote, but I will admit that, as a result, I've tried to shy away from red-button issues for this week's piece. I went looking for a safe topic. A respite from abuse. Something so boring that nobody would get riled up about it. Something like free and open source software licenses, for example.

The motivation for the topic came from a recent article by Dave Winer entitled "What is Open Source?" The URL is in the Resources following this column. I found Winer to be way off the mark in answering his title question as well as in a few of the conclusions he reached.

Winer is a bright, literate software professional. At first blush I thought his negative tone about open source and his confusion about the topic were simply the result of classic ingroup vs. outgroup thinking: a legacy programmer writing proprietary code versus the free and open source revolution that is turning the software world on its head. That and perhaps a bit of fear about the inevitability of free software and the impact that might have on his economic well-being.

As I've put this column together, however, my thinking has changed. I still believe that Winer is wrong on several key issues, including his definition of open source, but I no longer blame him for that. Instead, I believe he has become confused by all the rhetoric generated on both sides of the free software vs. open source debate and the BSD and GPL licensing wars.

"A program is said to be open source if the full source code for the program is available publicly with no constraints on how it can be used," Winer said. Under that definition, the only thing that qualifies as open source is public domain
software. Every license places some constraint, or else there would be no point in having it in the first place.

The Open Source Initiative (OSI) also disagrees with Winer's definition of open source. On its Website (see Resources for a link) the definition of open source lists nine specific criteria that a license must meet in order to be an open source license. Those nine items do not prohibit constraints on how the software can be used. The Website also lists all software licenses that meet the criteria. The first one listed is the GNU General Public License, the GPL.

Winer then proceeds, using his own definition, to the conclusion that the GNU project is not open source since the GPL puts constraints on the use of the software. The

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