Ladies and Gentlemen of the speakup community On Sat, 25 Aug 2001, Gregory Nowak wrote: > and since it is open source, > we can engineer it exactly to please us > (unlike windows). I would like to make it very clear that there are many open source offerings in the world. However just because you have access to the source doesn't mean you can do with it as you like. The GNU GPL gives us ownership of the software we use. It allows us to change it and if we do change it we are obligated to contribute those changes back in to the community. The Microsoft shared source program is one example of shared source that isn't gonna get you anywhere. The reason why we have what we have today is because the software we use is "free software." This is very different from open source. A few of the programs that are discussed on this list are open source and yet are not free software. The xwindowing system is one of these such things. As is pine. What this means is that you can have the source code but you may or may not distribute your changes. Also it is not required of you to distribute source for these programs if you desire not to. This is how many commercial UNIX systems have sold modified x packages and not included the source for there modifications. This imho is a problem. People have worked very hard to make free software what it is today. If you want to spit in the face of those people that's fine. But let me warn you. This freedom that you enjoy may not be around for long if you don't contribute back to the free software community. You may find that no longer will you have the latest and greatest software because others will also start to distribute software which is not free. So let us be very clear when we talk about open source vs. free software. They are two different things. Open source software does not,may I repeat , does not insure that the next guy won't take your source run off with it make changes and not contribute the source back to the community. This imho is a big problem. I encourage all of you to listen to Richard Stallman's arguments about why software should be free. Have a look at ftp://linux-speakup.org/pub/linux/goodies/audio-files/ where there are two ogg files called rms-nyu1.ogg and rms-nyu2.ogg. I am working on making smaller ones available. -- Frank Carmickle phone: 412 761-9568 email: frankiec at dryrose.com
