Re: Stop Debian/FreeBSD

[Antti-Juhani Kaijanaho <gaia@iki.fi>]

On Thu, Nov 18, 1999 at 10:06:18PM -0600, John Goerzen wrote:
> The fact that SPI will not make it proprietary does not prevent it
> from becoming so.  The BSD license permits it.  And people have, and
> continue to, exploit this weakness in the BSD license.

Some people consider that weakness a strength.

> This is no mere political thing as you try to make it.

Yes it is, it is very political.

> What you and
> others are trying to do is, in my opinion, seriously damaging to the
> Free Software community.

The free software community is not GPL only.  It includes such things
as the *BSD, Mozilla, Hugs, NCurses, none of which come under the GPL.
Some of them have the BSD property, some don't.  IMAO your idea of GPL
as the only true free license is what hurts free software much more
violently than this Debian BSD thing.

> This issue is much bigger than that; I think it deserves wide
> attention instead of being relegated to an obscure mailing list.

This discussion does not belong to debian-devel.  Trying to subvert that
fact in the name of getting "wide attention" just makes you look like
a fool and a net neophyte.

> Make 
> no mistake about it, had Linux used the BSD license, the Free Software 
> community would, by this time, be virtually entirely sold out to
> commercial interests and fragmented.
> 
> This happpened to BSD.

I did not happen to BSD.  There are three thriving BSD projects, all
free software.

> WE MUST NOT ALLOW people to do that to Debian.

You may feel like this.  I don't.  Don't make it look like this is
what Debian should do, because it isn't.  If you disagree, please quote
the scriptures.

> Why not try to help the free software community
> instead of hurt it?

Look who's talking.

We should try to unify the free software community instead of breaking it.

-- 
%%% Antti-Juhani Kaijanaho % gaia@iki.fi % http://www.iki.fi/gaia/ %%%

                                  ""
                             (John Cage)