<blockquote>'After all 'open source' was conceived as a means of making free software more acceptable to the enterprise by changing terms, tearing away misconceptions and offering concessions to a more liberal licensing regime.
But Simon Phipps, a member of the board of the Open Source Initiative (OSI), tells a different story. "My view has been that principles drive action," he says, "and the point of OSI when it was started in 1998 was that there was a group of people who realised that the principles of free software were not penetrating into business, and decided to do something pragmatic about it. If you ask any of the people involved, such as Bruce Perens", the Debian leader who drew up the Debian Free Software Guidelines, "they will tell you that the guiding principle was free software, and it was the Debian Free Software Guidelines that became the Open Source Definition. So it's very hard to create a conflict between the two unless you take an absolutist position that says if you do any free software you must do all free software." '
- Richard Hillesley,
The pragmatism of free software idealism, 24 March 2011</blockquote>