Speaking as a community member not a committee member anymore - as of Friday night :)....
On Fri, 2006-03-24 at 10:04 +1200, Bret Comstock Waldow wrote: > I will use the "Royal you" in writing this. It's not referring just to > Visser, Martin, but to all the readers. > > On Fri, 24 Mar 2006 08:40, Visser, Martin wrote: > > Huh? When did this thread become a debate on the definition of Free or > > Open Source Software? > > > When this group decided to advertise itself as a Linux user's group. Linux > is > GPL, not Open Source. Open Source allows restriction, GPL works decidedly > against restriction - they are aligned by accident in some ways, and > diametrically opposed in others. ... SLUG has been a Linux users group for a long time now, since the time when a Linux user was always a software developer. Its one of the groups that are most passionate about software freedoms that I know. I think you are 'drawing a long bow' here in your [paraphrased] claim that setting societal guidelines is equivalent to not supporting the spirit of the GPL. Rather than argue with you about whether you are right or wrong I'd like to invite you to think about a few key things here... Linus happily uses proprietary products routinely: MacOSX most recently and BitKeeper most famously. Citing Linus as a shining example of what gives the GPL its philosophical strength is ironic at best. Richard Stallman by contrast does not use any proprietary software at all. Secondly, licences such as Microsofts 'Code Sharing' thing which is what I think you are referring to your email are emphatically *not* Open Source licences. http://www.opensource.org/docs/definition.php provides the definition for open source, and it *specifically* allows you to modify any open source program and create new programs from it - such action requires the ability to use the code shipped. Thirdly, the GPL is not as cut-and-dried 'free' as you seem to think it. The GPL provides *specific* freedoms and benefits in exchange for other *specific* freedoms or benefits. For example: The freedom to create a 'binary only download' of a cool tool is curtailed by the GPL [to an extent. There are loopholes the size of 18-wheeler road-trains.] But in exchange we get a software commons where anyone shipping binaries is compelled to contribute to the commons. BSD licence advocates say that this exchange is unhealthy for a number of reasons, one being that web services can be considered an end-run around it, and another that its unhealthy to solve a social problem by technical means. Lastly, and this is the most important point: a society which wishes to encourage a specific culture - say one of support and guidance between members *MUST* have a mechanism to deal with rogues (i.e. [0]). It *is* possible for a single person to provide an incredibly disruptive influence on a much larger society [1], and societies in the pre-net era had defense mechanisms. I think its entirely appropriate that there be such defense mechanisms for the SLUG culture which IMO is still one of the most fantastically supportive free software groups around. [I say that with considerable pride to have been chosen by the SLUG members to be a committee member two years running.] One challenge for SLUG is to make those defense mechanisms as low-impact on the members as possible, else the society becomes a less pleasant place to be and may be just as harmful as leaving the rogue in place [2]. Individual defenses suh as killfiles are clearly insufficient [3, 4, 5]. Right now we are failing on that, and I'm going to do a talk at the April meeting [if the new committee are interested in me doing that - are you? I think I am in town for that meeting] about this. It seems to be a bit of a common theme at the moment in a number of on-net societies and I'd like use to learn from and think about the ramifications this is raising. (I've picked on debian-devel as a source for these references because it happens to be dealing with an extreme case of a rogue at the moment, and the patterns of behaviour and the thought going into it is enlightening). There are other examples to be had, and I suspect its rather iceberg like - many more examples are private and not made public than ever reach archived mailing lists. Rob [0] http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2005/08/msg00005.html [1] http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2006/03/msg00620.html [2] http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2006/03/msg00734.html [3] http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2006/03/msg00841.html [4] http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2006/03/msg00667.html [5] http://www.kitenet.net/~joey/blog/entry/thread_patterns-2005-10-27-00-53.html -- GPG key available at: <http://www.robertcollins.net/keys.txt>.
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