Bram Moolenaar <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > Richard Stallman wrote: > > > I have no comments on vim from a technical standpoint, but its license > > includes a restriction that makes it not free software. Unless the > > license is changed, please don't use vim. > > Please don't project your interpretation of the term "free software" > unto the rest of the world. In my opinion the license that Vim uses > makes it more free than the GNU public license. That is because the GPL > enforces the source code of modified versions to be published, the Vim > license does not always enforce that. Therefore the Vim lincese gives > more freedom. Otherwise the licenses are practically the same.
This slightly misrepresents the GPL, because the GPL only forces you to make source code available to the people you distribute binaries to, which is not quite the same thing as forcing it to be published. I note that Debian considers Vim to be free software, as it is in main rather than non-free. Debian is rather strict about "free". Vim's licence would appear to be GPL-incompatible because of this bit (taken from Debian's /usr/doc/vim/copyright): > When the maintainer asks for it (in any way) you must make your changes, > including source code, available to him. > > The maintainer reserves the right to include any changes in the official > version of Vim. This is negotiable. You are not allowed to distribute a > modified version of Vim when you are not willing to make the source code > available to the maintainer. You can distribute a modified version of a GPL program without giving the changes to the original author or the oficial maintainer. Being GPL-incompatible is not a crime, but it can be expected to annoy some people ... and it can cause a lot of trouble if you make a library (or code that might end up in a library) GPL-incompatible. Edmund - Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/
