On Tue, 30 Jul 2002, Evan Leibovitch wrote: > The two commonly used yardsticks are the Open Source Definition at > opensource.org and the free software definition maintained by the FSF.
Where there will be the most controversy is not likely the Open Source vs Free Software licenses, but where you have proprietary software "running on top of" Open Source/Free Software. When I was a member of OCLUG the old "I want Microsoft Word for Linux" conversation often came up, and it was believed by many that "any software running on Linux, including Microsoft software, was A-Good-Thing (tm)". Will CLUE simply avoid this question, or make a statement? I will affect what type of "Advocacy" that CLUE can do, if CLUE decides to do any advocacy at all. > Yup. Normally that kind of thing is expressed in the charter of the > corporation or even in a (shudder) mission statement. I think it would be useful for CLUE to start with its own past, and move forward from there: http://www.linux.ca/library/mission_statement.shtml "CLUE promotes the use of Linux in Canada by fostering communications and cooperation between users, developers, the media, the general public, and the private and public sectors." There is a fair bit of previous suggestions on how to do that also on the same page. > I think you'll find within the community a fairly diverse range of > approaches to the ethics of (for instance) including non-free software > such as Netscape or Acrobat in distributions. *sigh* http://www.flora.ca/pdf.shtml > If you try to be too > restrictive in your definition of who's "right", your remaining > organization could be too small to accomplish much. The most problems happen when you aren't up-front about these things. The last thing that a primarily "Linux" promoting group needs is to give the impression that it is also promoting "Free Software". Then Free Software types like myself come aboard, only to be seen as distractions by others who have a different approach to the issues. Again, there is overlap - but one group cannot be all things to all people. Peoples motivations are quite different. Note: I still to this day don't run KDE, and it was the long-past QT license battles that is the primary reason and not a technical one. Scars were left on both sides of that battle. The battle rages on with things like PHP given that ZEND (a part of PHP - the rest is an "artistic license" similar to Apache) is licensed under the QPL. > I think that many who take the pragmatic approach suggest that Linux's > appeal to greed (its lower cost to own, maintain and copy) gets the foot > in the door. Having made the entrance, the other benefits of software > freedom can be much more easily explained and demonstrated. > > Is this approach unethical? I certainly don't think so. It is a different approach, that is attractive to different people. The "Open Source" approach is quite pragmatic for the private sector. I happen to believe it is the "Free Software" approach that is more pragmatic for the policy makers in the public sector, where the business-benefits are then recognized after the public policy (IE: Freedom stuff ;-) implications are understood. Someone like yourself will be a better person to go in to advocate to other businesses or the average citizen (Consumer? User? I hate those word ;-), while people like myself focus on the public policy development side of government. We do need to be careful to not call each other names or get angry at each other, as becomes quite common in these conversations. It was already suggested in this forum that I'm not being pragmatic because I think beyond the next quarter, and have focused a considerable amount of my business and personal volunteer time on the "Free Software" philosophy. --- Russell McOrmond, Internet Consultant: <http://www.flora.ca/> See http://weblog.flora.ca/ for announcements, activities, and opinions Getting Open Source and Linux INto GovernmentS | No2Violence in Politics http://www.flora.org/dmca/forum/942 | http://www.no-dot.ca/ --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
