Ian Hickson wrote:
>
> I didn't say he didn't. Yes, the MPL and the BSD are free software
> licenses. My point was that "open source" and "free software" are
> different, which is easily proved by comparing their definitions.
Other people's replies also asked the following, but I didn't see a
specific answer from you:
I've heard this claim a lot, but I've *never* seen specific proof, or
heard of any license (real or even hypothetical) which would be Free
Software but not Open Source, according to the respective definitions.
(The FSF's free software definition is at
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html; the DFSG are at
http://www.debian.org/social_contract#guidelines and the OSD is at
http://www.opensource.org/docs/definition.html. Although the DFSG are
not an official "free software" definition, they are widely accepted as
such, and are almost exactly identical to the OSD).
There are licenses that are "officially accepted" by each party that
aren't by the other, but every such case that I'm aware of is a matter
of interpretation - like the fact that the Artistic License is
considered too vague to be enforceable, rather than specifically
non-free.
Can you provide a specific point of difference between "free software"
and "open source" that would make it possible for a license to be one
but not the other?
> My bad. I am against the LGPL (and the MPL, and the BSD license, etc)
> because free software projects should not, IMHO, promote or support
> proprietary projects.
I have decided to use the LGPL for the bulk of a program I plan on
releasing as Free Software -- not to promote proprietary software, but
because the GPL locks out too many widely used FREE licenses. That is to
say, I would be happy with a strong copyleft in principle, but am
unhappy with the GPL.
I believe it would be entirely possible to draft a strong copyleft
license "XPL" that would be compatible with all free software licenses.
Simply start with the GPL, and where it says "distribute the whole under
the terms of this license", write instead "distribute the whole under
terms which allow [FSF freedoms 0-3]". Of course, doing any such thing
would require some thought - perhaps it would be desirable to require
that at least the parts that are directly based on XPL'd code remain
XPL'd, for example - but philosophically and legally it doesn't seem too
hard to create a strong copyleft which would simply require that the
whole work be Free, rather than that the whole work be also strong
copyleft.
If the FSF wish to promote strong copyleft as a concept, it would be in
their best interests to do such a thing: I would use such a license over
the LGPL, where I will not use the GPL, and I doubt I'm alone.
Stuart.
