Hi, On Tue, 29 Oct 2002, _brian_d_foy wrote:
> > A FOSS ban would have an especially negative impact on DoD software > > development. > > reference? This is from Section 0.7.2 of the document. The full quote is "A FOSS ban would have an especially negative impact on DoD software development. Development projects that use FOSS versions of the C and Ada programming languages would face costly translations to proprietary compilers and run time support packages. For the latter case of Internet-based languages such as Perl, recovery would be especially difficult since there are no immediately available commercial equivalents." > does FOSS mean Free Open Source Software? As defined in the report, FOSS refers to "Free and open-source software (FOSS) is software that gives users the right to run, copy, distribute, study, change, and improve it as they see fit, without them having to ask permission from or make additional payments to any external group or person. The word free in FOSS refers not to fiscal cost, but to the autonomy rights that FOSS grants its users. (A better word for zero-cost software, which lacks such rights, is freeware). The phrase open sourc emphasizes the right of users to study, change, and improve the source code?that is, the detailed design?of FOSS applications. Software that qualifies as free almost always also qualifies as open source, and vice versa, since both phrases derive from the same set of software user right formulated in the late 1980s by Richard Stallman of the Free Software Foundation." -lisa
