Barry Margolin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: >In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, > "Roger Johansson" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>> Jim Richardson wrote: >> >> > "freeware" and "Free Software" are not the same thing. Free Software >> > refers to (mostly) GPL stuff. (See the FSF for details) that's all Open >> > Source, as well as "Free Sosftware" freeware, is just the usual "try our >> > stuff before you buy" thing. A whole different kettle of fish. >> >> At the heart of this matter we find a group of people who have created >> the FSF you mention, Free Software Foundation. >> >> Obviously they think they can hijack a common word like free, and >> decide that it can only mean one thing in connection to software. >Whether they should be able to is of purely academic interest. The fact >is that they *did* do this, and this is what the phrase "free software" >now means in the industry. You can dislike it all you want, but you >can't legitimately claim that it didn't happen, and ignoring it will >simply lead to confusion in discussions like this. Well, not defining your terms can certainly lead to confusion in a discussion like this. And it seems that the OP does not really want to define his terms. However, software where the binary is distributed for free ( eg the drivers for ATI and NVIDEA cards for Linux from those companies, the firmware for almost all wireless cards, ...) but source code is NOT supplied, and the license with the free software explicitly disallows reverse engineering, so it is certainly not open source. Ie, free software and open source software as categories describing the distribution of the software are certainly different. >-- >Barry Margolin, [EMAIL PROTECTED] >Arlington, MA >*** PLEASE post questions in newsgroups, not directly to me *** >*** PLEASE don't copy me on replies, I'll read them in the group *** _______________________________________________ gnu-misc-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/gnu-misc-discuss
