Richard Stallman contacted me recently by email, asking if there were ways in which the FSF and OGP could cooperate. I told him that we are definitely interested in that, and we've had some further discussions about a number of other things. His opinions and mine don't line up 100%, but I want to attempt to relate his opinions without misrepresenting them too badly.
I'll begin with a quote: Richard Stallman wrote:
We encourage the idea of free hardware designs, but we don't think it is ethically required that all hardware designs be free, because most users are not in a position to turn a hardware design into hardware.
In general, he feels that it's not necessary for the OGP hardware designs to be "Free" (libre), and the FSF would be willing to cooperate with us regardless, as long as we support Free Software. He suggests that we may want to keep the design closed for a year or two and then make it Free after that. So, now I feel somewhat vindicated against all of the flak I've gotten for suggesting the idea of keeping anything closed. :) But besides the good feeling or rubbing this in people's noses, this really won't change my direction any. As always, we're going to play it by ear and make sound, ethical decisions as they need to arise. Most likely, the whole design will be produced completely out in the open, although that is affected somewhat by how much help we get. Richard Stallman is very precise with his language and wants to make a clear distinction between his ethics-based "Free Software" and, for instance, ESR's practicality-based "Open Source." As such, he has made a few requests. It seems clear to me that these are merely requests and not anything like demands. They will cooperate with us regardless, as long as we support Free Software. One is, in general to prefer the term "Free Software" over "Open Source". The dictinction, as I understand it, between the two is one of motivation (ethics vs. practicality). Another request is to change the name of the Open Graphics Project to something that contains the name "Free." I suspect that our name is too entrenched for that to cause anything but irreparable harm, but it's open for discussion. I think this project strives to embody all of the principles behind Free Software. But I also believe we do precisely the same with respect to Open Source. That is, we're both ethical AND practical. Finally, and this is a request we can really do something with, is to come up with terminology to describe the nature of the hardware designs we're producing, using the word "Free". There's been some discussion here about this already, covering various levels of openness or freeness. We've discussed terms like "Free-spec Hardware," "Free Design Hardware," "Free Hardware Design," etc. When the design is completely libre, we should use a term that describes it this way. Pertaining to designs that simply open up their interfaces, the FSF would like "Free Software" to me mentioned, pointing out that Free Software is supported by the hardware. Finally, and this is my opinion, I think the term "Open Architecture" is perfectly fine since that's a well-understood term, despite the fact that it contains the word "Open". I suspect Mr. Stallman would disagree with me on that, however. As a disclaimer, I've probably done a lousy job of relaying his thoughts. -- Timothy Miller http://www.cse.ohio-state.edu/~millerti _______________________________________________ Open-graphics mailing list [email protected] http://lists.duskglow.com/mailman/listinfo/open-graphics List service provided by Duskglow Consulting, LLC (www.duskglow.com)
