Free code?

José Antonio Barriga kicks off his blog with a confusing title, Microsoft and Free Code" (“Microsoft y el Código Libre”). I have to confess that I always have trouble referring to FLOSS. I often talk about free software, about open source, or about open code, and sometimes I use the terms interchangeably, even though I’m well aware that they are not the same thing. But Barriga outdoes me: ingeniously, he mixes the two terms and creates “free code” ?!

Well, it’s not the terminology Microsoft normally uses. In its press releases free software simply doesn’t exist. Microsoft’s policy has been consistent on this through all these years: not recognizing the GPL as valid, and therefore avoiding this category of free software altogether.

Microsoft’s recent move, asking for the OSI’s blessing for its licenses, aims at reinforcing the concept or idea of open source software over the concept of Free Software, which for Microsoft is a cancer (and for some fanatics is pure communism).

The truth is that the ideals of free software, for a number of developers, are closer to the ideas of extreme liberals, or libertarians (à la Milton Friedman), than to communism, but then, each side tries to bring this “free software” grist to its own mill.

So my confusion only grows: in these ideological arguments, where the hell do we put “free code”?