B"H On 8/18/05, Alan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > As for Stallman using Free. I think he'd prefer that software be free in > every sense of the word, but he's smart enough to know that's not > practical(in today's world anyway). >
I don't think that Stallman wants software to be available for no charge. Stallman himself charged $150 for a copy of GNU Emacs (It was still available for free on ftp). To quote <http://www.gnu.org/gnu/thegnuproject.html>: ---quote----- I could have said, "Find a friend who is on the net and who will make a copy for you." Or I could have done what I did with the original PDP-10 Emacs: tell them, "Mail me a tape and a SASE, and I will mail it back with Emacs on it." But I had no job, and I was looking for ways to make money from free software. So I announced that I would mail a tape to whoever wanted one, for a fee of $150. In this way, I started a free software distribution business, the precursor of the companies that today distribute entire Linux-based GNU systems. ---end quote---- And: -----quote------ Here, therefore, is the definition of free software: a program is free software, for you, a particular user, if: * You have the freedom to run the program, for any purpose. * You have the freedom to modify the program to suit your needs. (To make this freedom effective in practice, you must have access to the source code, since making changes in a program without having the source code is exceedingly difficult.) * You have the freedom to redistribute copies, either gratis or for a fee. * You have the freedom to distribute modified versions of the program, so that the community can benefit from your improvements. Since "free" refers to freedom, not to price, there is no contradiction between selling copies and free software. In fact, the freedom to sell copies is crucial: collections of free software sold on CD-ROMs are important for the community, and selling them is an important way to raise funds for free software development. Therefore, a program which people are not free to include on these collections is not free software. -----end quote----- Menachem > -ajb > > > > -- > [email protected] > http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list > -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
