[OT] Open Source? No. Free (Source)!
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Anyone read ESR's "Open Source Summit" in this June's Linux Journal?
In light of the recent (hoping it's over and done with) flame war over
the issue, I find the following sentence alarming:
One of the meeting's important results was a general agreement that,
in all the variant definitions, *public access to source* was the
most important and only absolutely critical common element.
We could (and probably can and will) argue about the meaning of
'public access', but it's obvious, when you think about it, that the
right to modify the source code and redistribute this modified source
code, is one of *the* core points in the GPL and the DFSG.[1]
Seems to me Qt (just to pick a nice inflamatory example >:-)) could
easily pass any generic 'Open Source' test, if the only really
essential criterion would be 'Public Access' to source. Of course you
gt the source, of course you can read it... :-}
And given that one of the participants of the 'Summit' was Phil
Zimmerman (I am about to slaughter a holy cow here, so brace
yourself), who's PGP is distributed (I refer to 5.0 here) with a
non-DFSG-compatible license[2]... this does show the tendencies of the
'Open Source' movement.
All this does not bode well for 'Open Source' and the Free Software
community. I think getting the FSF (and, by implication, RMS) to
'speak one language' (as ESR put it) together with the (other) Open
Source propenents is just a pipe dream...[3]
Anyway, (here's to preaching to the converted)
Bye, J
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[1] I am not a Debian developer or maintainer... but I *am* very happy
to have stumbled on Debian the way I did (not because it was Free
Software, but because it was the most accessible(!) of all the
distributions I checked out). I sure would have switched to it
eventually anyway... I am a (newly) self-proclaimed Free Software
Zealot ;-)
[2] Why Debian does indeed use this... okay, there's no alternative.
Right now. But GPG (www.d.shuttle.de/isil/crypt/gnupg.html) is
shaping up real good... but you're probably already planning the
switch, right? ;-)
[3] 'Speak one language' yeah, that'd be nice... it seems to me they
just don't.
- --
Jürgen A. Erhard eMail: jae@laden.ilk.de phone: (GERMANY) 0721 27326
MARS: http://members.tripod.com/~Juergen_Erhard/mars_index.html
SPACE: Above And Beyond (http://www.planetx.com/space:aab)
"No matter how cynical I get, I can't keep up." -- Bruce Schneier
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