On Mon 07 Jul 2003 07:25, Buchan Milne posted as excerpted below: > Having the source to software which you distribute is useless if you > cannot fix bugs and distributed the fixed software.
Interesting discussion, here. I'm glad to read that it may soon be GPLed.. However, to the specific point addressed by the quote above.. I wouldn't call available source unable to be modified USELESS. Insufficient for Mdk, definitely. Insufficient philosophically to a Software Libre advocate, definitely. Useless, not entirely. At least one specific use (or lack of it in this example) that has been a complaint about MS-ware, for instance, is that it was impossible to security-verify it. MS has addressed that to a large extent with its shared source and government source review programs, thus muting to some extent at least one specific point of the Peruvian documents, that a government would be irresponsible if it chose to use closed source since it is entrusted with a large amount of private data of its citizens, and there was no way to verify that the data remained private, because the source was unavailable. Other points in those documents, including both the data hostage situation and the local economic impact of exporting those $$ vs. keeping them local, certainly remain, but the one point has been to some extent blunted, at minimum. -- Duncan - List replies preferred. "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety." Benjamin Franklin
