Defining Free Software Business

[Alex Hudson]

On Mon, 2006-06-26 at 13:28 +0200, Alfred M. Szmidt wrote:
>    Debian takes some crap for being clear and honest in its labelling.
> 
> Sorry, that is simply wrong.  You say that Debian is 100% free, well,
> clearly it isn't.  Debian distributes and promotes non-free software.
> It is as simple as that.  That you then tell everyone that a square is
> a sphere is quite depressing.

FSF doesn't promote Debian, because Debian has non-free. Debian doesn't
include some FSF documents, because they believe they are non-free.

That both sides don't agree with each other over small areas (Debian's
non-free, or the FSF's GFDL'd docs) really doesn't matter a huge amount
in the grand scheme of things IMHO. The FSF and Debian have vastly more
in common than they disagree over.

The BSD community also don't think the GPL is 100% free. We'll always
have these disagreements. We're a broad church, and will always have
these disagreements. It doesn't help to keep going over them though, I
think - I'm sure people on both sides understand the other's position.

Cheers,

Alex.