Re: my answers to questions

[cjw44@flatline.org.uk (Colin Watson)]

Dale Scheetz <dwarf@polaris.net> wrote:
>On Mon, 5 Mar 2001, Marcus Brinkmann wrote:
>> You are quite wrong. Proprietary software is non-free, so if all non-free

Note, not "non-free is proprietary software" ...

>You ask later in this posting what "bluring" I'm refering to. Well, here
>it is.
>
>Prorpietary is a very restrictive term meaning that all rights allowed
>under the copyright are being reserved by the author/copyright holder.
>I should not need to explicitly mention which companies release sofware
>under such licenses. However no such licenses appear in our non-free
>archives.

I'd say that, for example, Netscape counts as proprietary; about the
only thing that lets us distribute it is the fact that that can be done
for no cost. Taking that as an assumption for the rest of this post for
the sake of argument:

>non-free (note the lack of capitalization) is a location on our web/ftp
>servers for software that doesn't meet our definition of freedom as
>specified in the DFSG.
>
>Your insistance that these two are the same is a bluring of the concepts.

He isn't insisting that at all! He's insisting, I think (forgive me if
I'm putting words into your mouth, Marcus) that proprietary software is
a *subset* of non-free, while commercial software may be either free or
non-free. And that's entirely correct. You're confusing his statement
that "proprietary software is non-free" with "proprietary software is
equivalent to non-free", which doesn't follow at all.

Taking it from that standpoint, it makes perfect sense to correct
'commercial interests conflict with non-free' to 'proprietary interests
conflict with non-free', because the latter is at least arguably true
and the former isn't; it doesn't have to mean that that's the only thing
conflicting with non-free, nor that the only thing we put in non-free is
proprietary software, which obviously isn't true.

[Rest snipped, because I think the rest of it stems from this
misunderstanding. *sigh* We need a better natural language.]

-- 
Colin Watson                                     [cjw44@flatline.org.uk]