On Wed, May 25, 2016 at 7:01 PM, Rugxulo <rugx...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Although licensing discussions are usually not productive in their own
> right ("shut up and code!"), and it's always a waste of time and words
> rehashing the same old issues, there are some helpful web pages that
> clarify (at least to me) various aspects of the computing world at
> large.
>
> In other words, here's some links for your edification, but please
> let's not devolve this into arguments, flamewars, etc. This is more
> friendly advice than anything, just so some of you know what is up (if
> you didn't already).
>[...]I'll add a few comments here: Stallman holds a very strict view on "free software" because he created GNU and the Free Software Foundation for ethical reasons. Stallman didn't like that companies and organizations were no longer sharing the source code to their programs, and were "locking out" users from modifying these programs to fix bugs or to make the software do something different. Stallman wanted all software to be free as in "freedom." Raymond came at the topic from a different direction. He was helping companies implement free software - either to use in-house or to include in a product. Raymond kept running into problems with the term "free." Companies would see "free software" and assume they would have to give everything away at no cost. "Free" software was confusing. So Raymond created the term "open source software" to clarify that the source code was something you could see and even modify, but you didn't necessarily have to give it away for free. (Lots of companies make money by selling open source software. Red Hat is one such example.) But Raymond also had a more permissive view to what could be considered "open source software." Stallman didn't like that, and thought Raymond was missing the point. They have never gotten along. So while many people use "open source software" and "free software" interchangeably, remember that Stallman does not think they are interchangable. (I've somewhat simplified Stallman's and Raymond's views, above.) I usually describe "open source software" and "free software" as a Venn diagram: All free software is open source software (all free software requires that you make the source code available to others). But not all open source software is free software (sometimes the license for "open source software" doesn't meet Stallman's strict requirements). These days, I think "open source software" and "free software" are pretty much the same. I use the terms interchangeably. In general, I try to be careful about the licensing for programs we include in FreeDOS. We have run into problems before. 1. One example is ArrowASM. We included ArrowASM with FreeDOS for a long time, such as the FreeDOS 1.0 release. But in 2011, several FreeDOSers found that ArrowASM was just a "hacked" version of MASM 3.00 (see technote #240) and we promptly removed ArrowASM from the FreeDOS distribution and from the FreeDOS archives. 2. Another example from further back is FreeDOS SETVER. The developer of this program claimed on the mailing list that his latest version of SETVER featured better compatibility with MS-DOS SETVER because he borrowed code from the recently "leaked" MS-DOS 6 source code. We then dropped the SETVER utility from FreeDOS, and implemented that functionality a different way using FDCONFIG.SYS. To avoid running into problems, my preference is to include open source software with FreeDOS. I don't necessarily draw the line at "free software" the same way that Stallman does. Even a few years ago, I wanted FreeDOS to meet Stallman's Free System Distribution Guidelines (see Rugxulo's link), but these days it doesn't matter to me. I don't care if it's "open source" or some GNU license. If the program works, is open source, and let's others use it, I'm happy with it. Jim ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ What NetFlow Analyzer can do for you? Monitors network bandwidth and traffic patterns at an interface-level. Reveals which users, apps, and protocols are consuming the most bandwidth. Provides multi-vendor support for NetFlow, J-Flow, sFlow and other flows. Make informed decisions using capacity planning reports. https://ad.doubleclick.net/ddm/clk/305295220;132659582;e _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
