Dan Shafer wrote:
Richard....
I know you know this, but just to keep the conversation clear, "open
source" doesn't mean "free of charge." Not on any level.
As Richard Stallman patiently explained it over dinner in Chinatown to
me once, there's "free" as in "gratis" and "free" as in "freedom", and
open source means both.
Under most open sources licenses in some circumstances you can charge
for the object code, but the sources must still be available so the only
difference between gratis and non-gratis is five minutes to run the make
file.
A lot of open source software is available for free. Some isn't (MySQL
comes to mind immediately).
Review the licenses for MySQL. There are two. One is proprietary, and
carries a fee. The other is free of charge and the source is open and
modifiable, but only within the confines of the GPL.
So the open source version of MySQL is definitely free, in both senses
of the word. But proprietary use is governed by the proprietary non-GPL
license.
But lots and lots of programmers make lots and lots of money *using*
open source and *that's* generally the requirement governments are
placing on these projects. IOW, they don't insist the software they
buy be free of charge, just built on freely distributable bases.
That may be, and there may be variances from government to government.
But the bottom line for us Rev developers is that if a customer requires
a truly open source solution then the source must be open -- that's not
the case with Rev, Windows, or OS X, so it rules out solutions dependent
on any of those packages.
--
Richard Gaskin
Managing Editor, revJournal
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