FDL University-courses II

[Achim D. Brucker]

Hi,
Simo Sorce wrote in article  <1026892302.1778.7.camel at berserker>:
> 
> On Wed, 2002-07-17 at 08:28, Achim D. Brucker wrote:
>> project and thus avoiding the viral nature of the GPL).
>                                 ^^^^^
> 
> I think that's wrong speaking of GPL as viral!
you're right. I used the term "viral' somewhat injudicious. During the
last months I adopted this term, because in was so often stated in
discussions about the GPL.  I made personally very good experiences in
using this term while advocating the GPL (I could successfully
convince several university projects that they should use the
GPL.). It's definitely this property of the GPL, which made the GPL to
our "license of choice".
> Persistent could be a better term if you really need to further define
> it.
I' would happily adopted a better term describing this special GPL feature of 
protecting the freedom of software, spontaneous I would prefer sticky over 
persistent.
> 
> And why you do not speak of proprietary licenses as viral? They often do
I do not discuss non-free licenses, they are just in-acceptable :-) To
be more serious, while advocating the GPL I made the experience, that
it is quite easy to explain the difference between non-free (or
proprietary) and Free Software but it's quite a challenge to explain
the differences of the several free software licenses. Or even more
worse, to explain the very important difference between the whole
stuff which is now calling itself "open source" (which after a closer
look, is often non-free or even proprietary).

Achim