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Stallman Clarifies Position RE:Gnome & .Net
RMS ? has sent The Register an email in which he corrects their 'inaccurate' representation of his stance on the GNOME & .NET issue. He states, "I am pretty sure something was garbled in the quotation which has me asking Miguel to 'explain himself to us', because those words would be
explicitly confrontational, and I did not have any wish to do that."
> "GNOME is part of the GNU project, and is free software
> (some times referred to as open source software.)"
I take that to be saying that "free software" is not equivalent to "open source" software, although sometimes it is referred to that way.
No, he is not lying.
The "free software movement" based upon the
GPL, LGPL, GFDL etc. and started by GNU is
very different from the Open Source movement
started by Bruce Evans?
Anyway, the latter you can inform you about
at http://opensource.org
The former at http://www.fsf.org
FSF is the Free Software Foundation, which is
the nowadays' head of the GNU project, the
GNU licenses and non-GNU projects that are
under the [L]GPL and hosted by them but do not
belong to the GNU project as a whole.
RMS is head of the GNU project and the FSF,
so I think he is right to decide which direction
the GNU project follows, although I am not, in
my PERSONAL opinion, happy with this line.
Take the Gnu Compiler Collection (GCC) as an
example: http://gcc.gnu.org
The Copyright lines in the Copyleft license
(sigh!) refer to the FSF as owner.
If you want any of your changes be committed
into gcc you MUST transfer your copyright on
these changes to the FSF, which then, in turn,
incorporates them under the current GPL (or LGPL,
for example in the glibc, but I don't know if
this practice is there, too).
These are because then the FSF can be sure that
no third party copyright owner can claim anything
about such core projects as the gcc. For example,
if the GPL would prove invalid in court, the FSF
would change the GCC license from one day to
another to a protective one.
As I said, *personally* I am no GNU fan and do
use a modificated MIT/X/BSD license for my projects,
but on the other hand I am glad that RMS started
things such as the gcc that early.
Credits to whom credits belong.
My Karma isn't excellent, damn it! (And
He's not. If you bothered to read the article you'd see that someone told RMS that Miguel wanted to change the licence of Gnome to the X11 licence. RMS said he would not like that and that he did not belive Miguel would do that.
Oooh baby, the release of wget version 1.8 and then 1.8.1 in December was great! I think wget is more than enough to justify the existance of the entire Free Software Foundation. No, really. I'll donate to the FSF if someone keeps maintaining wget and makes it rock even more.
The Jargon Lexicon open source definition:
From Why "Free Software" is better than "Open Source":
~shiny
WILL HACK FOR $$$
Freedom #3; freedom to redistribute with modifications. See, for example, the SISSL, which is accepted by OSI but does not allow one to redistribute changes that aren't compatible with the standards setting body. [See section 3.1.] Or the revocation clause in the APSL, which is one of the three reasons the APSL isn't free.
All of that said... the point you're trying to make, Russ, is a sound one- the basic OSI philosophy is not incompatible with that of the FSF. But the FSF's philosophy is a superset of the OSI's- it isn't just 'see the source', which the OSI cares about, it also includes 'have freedom to use the source once you've seen it'- which the OSI doesn't care about, and which is why RMS dislikes them so much.
[up front: I'm a Ximian employee; I don't think that makes any difference to this point but I don't want to be accused of hiding it in an article about Miguel.]
IAAL,BIANLY
Go read what he as to say about the .NET Framework, Mono and GNOME.
He also replys directly to the RMS controversy.
Wax on, wax off baby!