On Jul 27, 2010, at 1:35 PM, Chris Knadle wrote: > I don't like the term "open source" because of the ambiguity it creates. For > instance, the proprietary Nvidia driver has the source available -- so that's > "open source" even though it's not "free software".
I'm not intimately familiar with the NVidia license, but "open source" has a very rigidly defined meaning, protected by its trademark-holder pretty well. I'll concede that some folks might think that "open source" and "source available" are the same, and that THAT might be itself ambiguous, but a clearly defined definition of "open source" can be easily pointed to... http://www.opensource.org/docs/osd > And "freedom" is ambiguous too -- within this context you could argue for the > BSD > because of the freedom it allows to release binary-only modifications, or > argue for the freedom of users to have access to distributed modifications > such as the GPL requires. Right, I've always personally believed that the BSD license is more "free" than the GPL is. But that's all about one's perspective on the matter. :-) Cheers, D
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