On Fri, 2008-04-25 at 13:45 -0500, Les Mikesell wrote: > Why should I be interested in a distribution that makes it > difficult > for me to make my own choices about whether a license is acceptable > or > not? I don't have a problem with downloading my own copy of any > particular code from any particular place under any conditions that I > find acceptable. But that is the problem. The folks with proprietary want to limit your use to only the systems they have chosen to support, thus you can end up with instruments or software that you have purchased that will not run when the OS changes. Furthermore their licenses forbid you from reverse engineering the code to figure out how to make it work some where else, and the owner of the proprietary OS won't let you do any reverse engineering legally to figure out how to interface to the software or hardware he/she/it chooses to no longer support. Thus you are obsoleted with no legal recourse. Those lovely sites where you download such utilities are often legally not clean to use either, depending upon the laws that the various entities have seen fit to pass. Finally your own documents, code and other encoded data may be unaccessable to you either, because the formatting, encoding, encryption or compression may be proprietary and non disclosed with the attendant no reverse engineering clauses, leaving you without access even to your own material. That is why these licenses, and the subject of libre or free software is important. Regards, Les H -- fedora-list mailing list fedora-list@xxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list
