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."

Comments

Re:Stallman Caught in Logical Contradiction?

[mirabilos]

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.

Re: clarification

[Penrod Pooch]

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.

Re:Straight from the horse's mouth....

[Shiny Metal S.]

So open source rejects your ideals of freedom, and has done since its foundation? Someone better notify the press :)

The first priority of the Free Software Foundation since the beginning in 1985 was always the freedom. Open Source Initiative came to existence in 1998 mosltly because the freedom related to the term "free software" was not very convenient. The OSI has chosen to use term "open source" instead of "free software", because it's easier to persuade corporations to use "open source software" than "free software", focusing on technical rather than ethical aspects. But the main priority of FSF was not to make the GNU more popular, but to make people aware of the freedom they should have, while the GNU sotfware was only a tool for that purpose.

The Jargon Lexicon open source definition:

open source n.

[common; also adj. `open-source'] Term coined in March 1998 following the Mozilla release to describe software distributed in source under licenses guaranteeing anybody rights to freely use, modify, and redistribute, the code. The intent was to be able to sell the hackers' ways of doing software to industry and the mainstream by avoiding the negative connotations (to suits) of the term "free software". For discussion of the follow-on tactics and their consequences, see the Open Source Initiative site.

From Why "Free Software" is better than "Open Source":

In 1998, some of the people in the free software community began using the term "open source software" instead of "free software" to describe what they do.

While free software by any other name would give you the same freedom, it makes a big difference which name we use: different words convey different ideas. The term "open source" quickly became associated with a different approach, a different philosophy, different values, and even a different criterion for which licenses are acceptable. The Free Software movement and the Open Source movement are today effectively separate movements, although we can and do work together on practical projects.

This article describes why using the term ``open source'' does not solve any problems, and in fact creates some. These are the reasons why it is better to stick with "free software."

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