make some notes to the way people waste their time on fruitless discussions.
Some people from BSD tell you that the GPL does not give you enough freedom and may be right.
Some people from FSF tell you that the BSD licence does not give you enough freedom and may be right.
So why spend time on discussions on the meaning of the word 'free'. These discussions will never end while the time spend on the discussions could be used better to support the movement.
A big problem seems to be that many people who now work on fs/oss joined the movement after Linux became public and don't have the knowledge on the historic background. People like me who are envolved with fs/oss since the early days in the mid 80's know about the historic background and thus may have different opinions on certain topics for this reason.
An important aspect of fs/oss in the 80s was the freedom to compile it on any OS. This freedom has become rare these days because many fs/oss developers (who mostly are newbies these days which of course is not bad in pronciple) don't have the needed background knowledge. They are developing on Linux only, not even kowing enough about the C-standard and the POSIX standard.
One of my focus in work is to develop tools that make real portability easier to achieve and to educate programmers on how to write highly portable programs and how to do this in a systematic, modular and reusable way. I am still missing help on this important topic from anyone outside BerliOS.
Another aspect of the BerliOS work is educate other people who currently have no relation to fs/oss on how to use fs/oss in their environment.
Jörg
EMail:joerg@schily.isdn.cs.tu-berlin.de (home) Jörg Schilling D-13353 Berlin js@cs.tu-berlin.de (uni) If you don't have iso-8859-1 schilling@fokus.gmd.de (work) chars I am J"org Schilling URL: http://www.fokus.gmd.de/usr/schilling ftp://ftp.fokus.gmd.de/pub/unix