Why we speak about Free Software

[Loic Dachary]

Jan-Oliver Wagner writes:
 > no, you are not going mad :-)
 > StarOffice is _no_ Free Software.
 > 
 > Yesterday I had a talk on Free Software and GIS at University of
 > Munster and exactly the same statement came up from the audience.
 > It is really interesting how it evolved that so many people
 > think of StarOffice as Free Software.

	I experience the same problems :-( Sun deliberatly marketed it
to achieve this result. Since OpenOffice is Free Software people say
StarOffice and OpenOffice interchangeably and they even *use*
StarOffice because OpenOffice is Free Software. To me it's like using
Oracle because MySQL is Free Software. There is hardly any rationale
in this behaviour but it's there anyway. I guess the only thing we can
do is to constantly remind people that OpenOffice is Free Software,
not StarOffice. That reminds me of people not willing to see the
difference between the Open Source movement and the Free Software
movement.

	Cheers,

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Loic   Dachary         http://www.dachary.org/  loic at dachary.org
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