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The lawsuit's basis is that OpenAI is "maximising profits" for Microsoft rather than being a non-profit and open-source company that had been agreed upon.
The lawsuit's filing comes after the Wall Street Journal reported that US regulators are investigating whether investors had been misled.
It would be a good idea to attempt to clarify what open source means and the use of the word "free" in connection with open source.
Generally, open source software refers to software that allows its users the freedom to use, study, distribute, and modify that software. It can also be used for commercial purposes. The production of open-source code is meant to be a collaborative effort where programmers improve upon the source code (a human-readable computer program) and share the changes within the community. Code is released under the terms of a software licence. Depending on the licence terms, others may download, modify and publish their version (fork) back to the community.
Richard Stallman started his open source crusade in 1980 when a Xerox office printer installed on MIT's Artificial Intelligence laboratory's network started jamming, and people's print jobs were not getting through the network. Richard was a programmer, not a mechanical engineer, so he thought of a software solution where a message would be sent to the users asking them to come and clear the paper jam.
Although Xerox had provided the printer free of charge for testing purposes, it had not provided a copy of the source code. So when Richard looked at the software, it was just an unintelligible stream of ones and noughts. This was about the time when companies started introducing proprietary software so that they could also make money out of the software and the hardware. As well as making the code difficult to access, they also introduced 'time bombs', which, after a set period, the software stopped working unless a purchased licence code was entered into the program.
Free and open-source software (FOSS) or Free/Libre and open-source software (FLOSS) is openly shared source code licensed without restrictions on usage, modification, or distribution.
Confusion abounds around using the word "Free" because free means "without charge" in common usage, but in open-source development, free refers to the freedom to use, study, distribute and modify the software. For example, "being free to speak" differs from a "free beer".
So, it is possible to have software that is free of charge but not open source, like Microsoft's Edge browser. It is also possible to get software that is both free of charge and open source.
