Re: Hurd advocacy?
> > Ugh? Please don't judge a book by its title. Code Reading is a
> > technical, not philosophical book. It contains numerous examples, from
> > NetBSD, Apache, Perl, XFree86, etc...
>
> Freedom is a question of ethics for me, not of mere pragmatism. The
> "Open Source" concept is the pretension that freedom is merely a practical
> issue, hence it reduces it to the technical ground.
>
> > Diomidis stopped short of using
> > the term "Free Software Perspective", because not every example is
> > GPLed. But as far as code reading skills are concerned, BSD-style
> > Licenses or Artistic are just as fine as GPL: they don't matter
> > w.r.t. understanding code.
>
> BSD-style licensed software is still free software (untill it's hoarded
> and becomes propietary, of course), which is the point of it. The fact
> that the parents of the free software movement have the GPL as their
> license of choice doesn't mean that only GPLed software is free.
Sorry, I don't agree here. BSD-style licenses grant users _and_
developers alike freedom to use the source as they see fit. This
qualifies BSD-licensed software as "free software", but not as "Free
Software". The latter term has the precise meaning of: "[L]GPLed
software".
I'm sure that a lot of people in the FSF/GNU culture would vehemently
protest if Diomidis (who, being a hacker, knows very well the difference)
used "Free Software" in his title, but examples from BSD-licensed
software in his book.
"Open Source Software" is not the best way to characterize BSD-style
software either. Many companies disclose their source code, thus
releasing "open source", but impose an inacceptable amount of
restrictions to users in their licenses. I don't feel comfortable
to have truly liberal licenses like BSD or Artistic (or variants
thereof) associated with "Open Source". Unfortunatly, this is
common practice.
Perhaps we should coin a new term for BSD-licensed software,
e.g. "Free++ Software"? ;-) [or "Free-- Software", depending on
where you're standing]
> > Again, this is not a book on Open Source vs. Free Software. It is a
> > book on reading and understanding code, not only from small projects,
> > but also very big ones as you can see.
>
> Then "The Open Source Perspective" is probably not the best title for
> such a book either.
Ack.
--
Farid Hajji. http://www.farid-hajji.net/address.html
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