Quoting Alexander Maryanovsky <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
> 1. The "Ila" guy seemed to misunderstand the whole "use Linux in govt." > proposition. This has been discussed a lot, but worth repeating: > His argument was that if Linux is good, it should compete and win based > on that, and not on a law. This is all well and nice for private > organizations and people, but for the government, one of the *features* > of Linux and OSS is their openness and auditability. Therefore it can be argued that the government should require software to be auditable by some means, but not to force Linux specifically, or even free software in general. For example, assume that MSFT gives the government a peek at their source code, subject to NDA and a license written by the same lawyers who write soul-selling contracts for Satan. >From the point of view of free software, this is bad. From the point of view of open source, still bad. But the government is still able to audit the code and see whether or not it has any backdoors and vulnerabilities. > 2. Nobody is making money from selling Free software? This may be true per > se, but it's a very bad statement. There are many companies who are making > money *developing* Free software, so who cares if they're not *selling* it > to make the money? The important thing is that valid business plans of the > type: > 1. Develop Free software. > 2. ??? > 3. Profit. That's advocacy. The point he was trying to make is that, although the GPL does not prevent people from making money on selling free software, real life seems to do, because nobody is a "fryer". Point being that if you go for free software, you have to find another way to make your money: the software cannot be the product you sell. Even your example of Trolltech is not good enough. Basically, if they make money from allowing people to close their software, then they are an Open Source company, not a Free Software company. QED. > 3. Linux is Open Source? FreeBSD is Free Software? Am I missing something > here? Last I checked, Linux was GPL and FreeBSD was BSD, making Linux Free > Software and FreeBSD OSS. Yes, he had several goofs. The StarOffice example below is another one. > The "Zend" guy > seemed much more proficient regarding the GPL/LGPL/BSD than Moshe Bar... I didn't attend that lecture. I guess he was proficient because PHP is licensed under a QPL derivative, or was last time I checked. Read its license, you have to be aware of the differences to choose such a license. > 4. OpenOffice a fork from last available open version of StarOffice? I'm > not 100% sure that it's not true, but AFAIK more than half of the people > working on OO are Sun's people. From what I understand, StarOffice is just > OpenOffice with various useful add-ons... Am I wrong? I thought the same. As far as I understand, he is not aware that new versions of Star Office are supposed to be based on OpenOffice, with "proprietary extensions". His description fits SO 5.2, not later versions. You forgot the biggest disappointment of all: RMS not showing up. If it wasn't for the promise of his presence, I would not have bothered - I heard nothing new today that was relevant to me, except perhaps the Eclipse sales pitch... Herouth ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
