, Praseed Pai wrote:
Hi All,
Praveen wrote
Do you know what happened between 1984 and 1990 in Free and Open
Source Movement?
What did you mean by this ?! That is a open ended question .
"He (re)gained the legitimate relevence in the Free and Open Source
Movement by advocating the prefix GNU before the Linux Operating System
(Kernel )."
I was referring to your quote above. What I meant was RMS did much more
than advocating "the prefix GNU before the Linux Operating System
(Kernel )". Read about things happened from GNU project starting in 1984
to around 1990 when Linus Torvalds released Linux kernel. It would help
you understand more about RMS and his contributions. He wrote GCC and
Emacs originally.
Praveen wrote
Are you saying that MIT and BSD does not come under four freedoms mantra?
RMS and FSF attack these liceneses based on the violation of fourth freedom.
These licenses do not mandate the propogation of derivative work.
Lets start from basics, from free software definition
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
* The freedom to run the program, for any purpose (freedom 0).
* The freedom to study how the program works, and change it to make
it do what you wish (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a
precondition for this.
* The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor
(freedom 2).
* The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to
others (freedom 3). By doing this you can give the whole community a
chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a
precondition for this.
and BSD license,
http://www.opensource.org/licenses/bsd-license.php
Read both of this together and see if it violates fourth freedom (or
freedom 3, if you start counting from 0).
Your disagreement with FSF seems to come from your mis-understanding of
Free Software definition itself.
And FSF lists BSD license as a GPL compatible Free Software license. See
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#GPLCompatibleLicenses
Your confusion seems to be coming from copyleft concept. If a software
is copylefted (ie, uses a license with copyleft conditions like GPL,
AGPL, LGPL etc), then any modification should be accompanied with
modified source code. BSD license does not have that requirement, so it
is not a copyleft Free Software license. We call it a permissive Free
Software license. It is very much Free Software as it has all the
Freedoms. FSF does not prefer non-copyleft license because it does not
guarantee Freedoms to every user for example, some one can take BSD
licensed code and chose not to give source code to their users.
Microsoft uses BSD's TCP/IP stack in Windows, but Windows users don't
get source code. On the other hand Microsoft released drivers for Linux
kernel, because Linux kernel is under GPL (you can argue about their
motivation though)
Did you even read Open Source Definition given by OSI? Are you sure
OSI does not care about fourth freedom? Can you quote from OSI site to
validate your assertion?
Then, why discussion about the Mono Project , WineLib and BSD stuff generates
heat here. Pls. educate me about that. OSI does not mandate that derivative
work need
to be published !
You are completely confused about many issues. Mono is Free Software.
Objection to Mono is based on Microsoft's patents on .Net technology.
Knowing Microsoft's nature, it is a wise decision to keep away from
Mono. Their strategy is encourage every one to use Mono and once it is
common, sue businesses depending on Mono. This strategy is not a theory,
but something demonstrated publicly in case of FAT file system patents.
Microsoft was silent about their patents on FAT until it became so
common in every portable storage device and once big companies started
depending on FAT, they started going after companies like Tom Tom (they
make GPS devices). I don't know why winelib develops heat. BSDs may be
because of non-copyleft nature, but it shouldn't generate much heat.
I never attacked people who has got strong views on Free software. I was trying
to
convey another angle to the debate.
Good.
I think you are talking about private software (software that is not
published) here. There is no conflict between private software and
Free Software. Many software developed by companies like Wipro,
Infosys are specific to one customer and they have all the freedoms.
So they are not in conflict with Free Software.
Oh...that was new for me as well as news for me. So, FSF is talking about
the published software. There is nothing wrong with developing private software
with windows , MAC OS X and other proprietory stuff ?
great !
Oh well, you are using proprietary software :) But your work may not be
proprietary.
Without producing sufficient programmers , this group as well as all others
with sufficient spirit is doomed !
Our country has probably largest number of programmers, but without
philosophy, we can't get more contributors to Free Software.
Thanks
Praveen
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