No subject

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 at schily.isdn.cs.tu-berlin.de (home) Jörg Schilling D-13353 Berlin
       js at cs.tu-berlin.de		(uni)  If you don't have iso-8859-1
       schilling at 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