Bryan Behrenshausen (he/him)

11844 points

Durham, NC

Bryan formerly managed the Open Organization section of Opensource.com, which features stories about the ways open values and principles are changing how we think about organizational culture and design. He's worked on Opensource.com since 2011. Find him online as semioticrobotic.

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Authored Content

Robin Miller's formula for a successful open source career

For an audience composed primarily of open source programmers, developers, and system administrators gathered at SouthEast LinuxFest, Robin Miller's message might be tough to…

The future must be decentralized

Deb Nicholson is worried about the future of our data. They're being stockpiled by organizations whose ability to protect them is diminishing, but whose ability to keep users…

Preparing for my first open source conference

It's time for a confession: I have never been to an open source conference. I've been an open source and free culture advocate for more than half a decade. I've used open…

Open thread: How to improve our community discussion list?

Let's talk about our community discussion list. It's a public mailing list we created some time ago to facilitate conversation about opensource.com. We envisioned it as a…

An open source analogy: Open source is like sharing a recipe

I love listening to open source gurus explain open source to those who have never encountered it, and especially to those with little computing background. In conversations…

Protests demonstrate growing demand for open access to research

Last week, Winston Hide committed what he called "a toxic career move." Hide, an associate professor of bioinformatics and computational biology at the Harvard School of…

Authored Comments

bbehrens

7 Nov 2016

'Open source' is not 'free software'

Thanks. That helps. And I suspect it tempers a bit the notion that free software "mandates sharing," because this is a specific case in which no such mandate is in place. That might be an interesting fulcrum on which one might lean when making the case for free software and/in the enterprise.

bbehrens

7 Nov 2016

'Open source' is not 'free software'

"Central to the spirit of free software is the idea that everyone should be able to use, modify, and share, with a defined limitation that you can't modify without sharing."

Is this true? My understanding is that I'm free to modify free software for personal use as much as I'd like without any compulsion to share those modifications. But should I choose to share the modified version of the software I must, in turn, share the modified source. Yes?