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Uh? I’m no FOSS historian, but the OSD was published around 1998 and the DFSG around 1997. I don’t think the precise dates matter that much, but there wasn’t in fact a lot of experience on enforcing “software freedom guidelines” when the OSD came out. Pretty similar to the current situation with OSAID as far as I can tell (except from the pure software parts of AI systems, which are well-understood and indeed non controversial from a definitional point of view).

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Yes, those years are accurate, but the history is longer.

I got into this around 1994, but then just as a bystander. I think the Debian team had to work out a lot of stuff throughout the late 90-ties, so, DFSG was the end point of that work. It had been really practical from 1993, even though there wasn’t much tension then. The tension arouse once Linux took off.

But Debian wasn’t the first distro, there was a few coming up in 1992, but that too wasn’t where it started, there was a clear need for a definition of Free Software that came in 1986. That, I assert, was actually the starting point that went into the OSD. And that too has seen many revisions.

Going further back, the FSD that was based on the GNU Manifesto from 1983, which was already pretty elaborate on what was Free Software and what wasn’t. And before that, the Berkeley Software Distribution from 1978, that carries a very permissive license. Around the same time, it was controversy between the Homebrew Computer Club and Micro Soft, the latter of which had a bunch of guys who thought that their contribution was greater than everyone elses. And before that, in 1971, Donald Knuth came to my alma mater carrying the first volumes of the Art of Computer Programming, and wishing to do further work on the SIMULA compiler, but the Norwegian research council at the time imposed terms that were unheard of and unacceptable to Knuth.

And I bet there is more.

So, certainly, the OSD was based on a long, long body of knowledge on actual tension around different practices around acceptable terms.

And AI is supposed to change everything. I guess it will, and I guess it is the reason why we have tension, but the key here is to understand what is it with this long history we should heed, and what is so different that we need further work.

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Since I am considered a bit of a historian, let me add a few details about the history. The first mention of what would later lead to the FSF’s 4 Freedoms appeared in the February 1986 issue of GNU’s Bulletin. At that time, it only mentioned “the freedom to copy a program and redistribute” and “the freedom to change a program,” which were just 2 freedoms. Moreover, these freedoms were simply mentioned within a broader description of what the FSF stood for, nothing more.

This changed a decade later in 1996. In the same section of GNU’s Bulletin, the phrase “the freedom to distribute a modified version” was added, which introduced the “3 Freedoms.” However, at that time, FSF itself was still more focused on explaining what GNU and Copyleft were, so nobody was yet calling this the “free software definition”.

The DFSG, which became the basis for today’s OSD, emerged from a completely different set of circumstances. As detailed in the latter part of the transcript of this roundtable discussion with Debian’s early members, a conversation with the then-CEO of Red Hat led to a sense of urgency among those members. They decided to create the Debian Social Contract, and in that process, realized there was no clear definition of free software anywhere, so they created the DFSG. Back then, it seems no one was fully aware of the 3 Freedoms. However, this led to the creation of the DFSG, which then connected to the OSD.

From this roundtable transcript, you can see some of the confusion surrounding the creation of the DFSG. But I like what Bdale Garbee-san said:

“Bdale: This whole phenomenon of waking up in the morning and realizing that there are 17,000 new messages is just beyond comprehension.”

It’s true that there are significant differences in opinion in the current OSAID discussions. But since we’re not seeing 17,000 new messages posted in this forum, I’m optimistic that we can still manage the situation.

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