Hi, It's very hard to speak wisely here. Please keep in mind that I'm not strictly advocating against proprietary software (even though I think, sometimes, it has very limited appeal).
On Thu, May 26, 2016 at 8:25 PM, dmccunney <dennis.mccun...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Thu, May 26, 2016 at 5:19 PM, Jim Hall <jh...@freedos.org> wrote: > > For the vast majority of end users *running* open source code, the > critical part is "Free as in beer." They don't have to *pay* for it. > The majority of *users* of open source products don't *need* the > source, and couldn't use it if they had it. They aren't programmers, > wouldn't understand the code, couldn't fix bugs or make enhancements, > and couldn't reproduce the build environment and build a duplicate of > the binary they got on their own machine. The just want > free-as-in-beer code that does what they need and they don't have to > pay for. They already paid for their hardware, phone/Internet, host OS, etc. Isn't that enough? It's not reasonable (to me) to have to infinitely pay pay pay just to be able to halfway sometimes use software in a very limited and restricted fashion. Face it, endless royalties only sound good to potential millionaires. To the poor schlubs stuck with the bill, they hate it; they don't want more taxes. But sometimes it's not about "no cost" but instead about finding something that is easily available (you know, not having to scrounge eBay for used copies from a company that doesn't exist anymore). Do you think all proprietary software is well-supported? Nope, it's up to the whim of the copyright holder. At least with free/libre software, you can fix it yourself or pay literally anyone else to do it. There's no chance to do that if proprietary developers don't care. > That's Stallman's problem. The question is how much anyone else > *cares* what he thinks. My impression is that increasingly few do. He received the 2015 ACM Software System award for GCC. Now, I have no idea how much he is still involved in that, but he was historically very crucial there. And yes, GCC is an impressive behemoth that made a huge impact on the world. There are still plenty of commercial compilers (even those based upon Clang), but without GCC the worldwide software ecosystem overall would be much "poorer". I agree that RMS' influence isn't as much as he'd like anymore, but he does have some good points. I assume you're implying that permissive licenses are very popular as well, not just GPL. > Every open source license I'm aware of assumes you will make source > offered under it available. If you aren't willing to release source, > you don't *use* an open source license. The differences lie > elsewhere, like how the code may be reused. No, most so-called "permissive" licenses don't force releasing sources. Only the original batch is released, but that's not your job to propagate (unlike GPL). So no, BSD or MIT don't force changes to be public. Maybe I'm misunderstanding here, but I assume you knew that already. > And every license I'm aware of other than public domain Which (like most licenses) isn't valid in 100% of all jurisdictions. > has the expectation that if you fork it to produce a closed source commercial > variant, you will negotiate a closed source license with the original > author permitting you to do so. You may not simply make a closed > source fork. http://docwiki.embarcadero.com/RADStudio/Berlin/en/BCC64 "BCC64 is based on Clang." (No, I'm not aware of them paying any royalties, nor of any legal need to do so. If they did, it wouldn't be considered "free/libre" and it would be shunned like OpenWatcom.) > You *go* closed source commercial because you plan to > *sell* the software you will create, and you cannot successfully > *sell* stuff offered as open source. If you do that, the original > author will generally expect a cut of the take, because you are making > money off his code. No, they don't expect any money, they gave it away "freely" (or maybe got paid once for it). So they don't get mandatory royalties. In general, like you admit, free software is more of a one-time bounty type of thing. It's not about perpetual royalties ("hoarding", as RMS calls it). RMS considers free software to be helping his neighbor, less about excessively restricting them in both freedom and money. Some things can't be solved with money alone. >> These days, I think "open source software" and "free software" are >> pretty much the same. I use the terms interchangeably. > > The question becomes whether you mean Free as in Freedom, or Free as > in Beer. :-) FreeDOS uses a GPL'd kernel, so that would be "freedom". Otherwise, what's the point? Just use old MS-DOS, but certainly Microsoft doesn't produce DOS (or OS/2 or Win16) software anymore, and it's much harder to find than it used to be. >> To avoid running into problems, my preference is to include open >> source software with FreeDOS. > > If you *only* wanted software in a FreeDOS distro that met Stallman's > requirements, you might have problems actually making a distro. Too > much of what you might like to include won't be under a GPL license. > If you relax your licensing requirements, things become easier. I assume you're aware that Ncurses is a GNU project but not GPL'd. Even though RMS is probably a so-called zealot, even he makes exceptions sometimes (whether reluctantly or directly). Anyways, our problem isn't lacking GPL, it's that things aren't all fully permissive either. Just having lots of GPL and BSD would be fine, but we're not quite there yet (and may never be, sadly, not to mention the whole "non-free" tools issue, ugh). > A FreeDOS distro should consist of code issued under a license that > lets it provide source as well as binaries. Precisely what licenses > are used is a detail. Licensing incompatibilities affect whether code > from one project can be reused in another. That's the developer's > problem. It doesn't affect whether FreeDOS can offer it, or whether > users can run it. You cannot easily (at no cost, at least) host or modify or redistribute code that isn't some sort of "libre" (open, free, whatever). Just having "sources available" is not anywhere near ideal nor good enough. Frankly, it's naive and lazy to pretend that things are as good as they can get. We need to fix any problems that are easily fixable. We need to stop making excuses. I'm not trying to nag or offend anyone, but it's not practical in any sense to have unnecessary restrictions, ad infinitum. > The more practical question is whether a FreeDOS distro should > *include* the source for what it offers along with the binaries and > documentation. > > Offhand, I'd say it *shouldn't*. The source should be *available*, > and the distro should state where and how to get it. But as mentioned > above, most users don't need and can't use source. They just want > binaries and docs. Why swell a distro with stuff the end user will > simply discard or ignore? I really hate to say it, but (overall) bandwidth is cheap. Maybe not for everyone but for most. Anyways, there is no forced requirement that you forcibly make users download sources, even if GPL'd. All you have to do is make it available as an option. You don't have to bundle it irremovably. > (And since the whole world doesn't have fast broadband, reducing the > delivered size of a distro reduces the bandwidth required to get it., > which may be a factor for FreeDOS users. A distro might exist as two > parts - part 1 is binaries and docs. Part 2 is source for them. > Everyone inclined to use FreeDOS gets part 1. The few who need source > get part 2.) Most OSes and software these days assume fast internet. So it's extremely unlikely that FreeDOS is the straw that broke the camel's back. As much as I'd normally agree to keep it small and separated, we just don't have enough volunteers to accomplish every obscure goal. Thus it's probably not worth worrying about at the moment. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ What NetFlow Analyzer can do for you? Monitors network bandwidth and traffic patterns at an interface-level. 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