It does appear that the inclusion of "open and not free" packages in GNOME is an exception, not rule.
If a program is not free, it cannot be in GNOME. Its inclusion would be a serious mistake. Has there been such a mistake? The cases you cite don't show any. On my system out of 109 packages 4 combine GPL/LGPL with BSD license, one combines GPL/LGPL with MIT (compiz-gnome). There are two different BSD licenses. Both of them are free software licenses (see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html). I hope these programs uses the revised BSD license, because that is compatible with the GPL. The original BSD license is incompatible with the GNU GPL, so combining the two would violate one license or the other. If "MIT" means the X11 license, that is also a free software license. So it looks like all the software you're talking about is free. Many people think that only programs under GNU licenses can qualify as free, but that's not so. For the definition of free software, see http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html. There are some licenses which are open source but not free software. Fortunately they are not used very often. You can find them, more or less, by comparing the OSI's list of approved licenses with http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html. I recall that Reciprocal Public License one of them; I found a few others but I don't recall which ones. I say "more or less" because if a license is not mentioned in license-list.html, it could be that it is free and we have not yet studied it. Also, there are many simple licenses that are minor variations of the BSD licenses or the X11 license; they are free, but it would be tedious to list them all. I know of one other way a program can be open source and not free. A product can come with binaries made from free software source code, and not let the user change the binaries. Then the source is free software but that binary is not. The definition of open source is not concerned with this issue. Thus, the tivoized binary (plus its source code) would be a program that is open source but not free software. I mention this issue for completeness' sake, but I don't think it affects the list of GNOME apps: all these apps can be built and run from source code. _______________________________________________ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list