Objective of IFSO Re: [Fsfe-ie] stuff from the past week [adelaney at cs.may.ie]

Georg C. F. Greve greve at fsfeurope.org
Thu Oct 30 12:00:20 CET 2003


 || On Thu, 30 Oct 2003 10:33:09 +0000
 || "Ciaran O'Riordan" <ciaran at member.fsf.org> wrote: 

 co> OSI list 47 approved licenses:
 co> http://www.opensource.org/licenses/

 co> The RealNetworks Public Source License (RPSL) is one OpenSource
 co> license that FSF rejected.  APSL-1.2 is another.

That is correct, but a little too literal minded. I am pretty sure
that neither was on the mind of the people writing the mails I replied
to.

In fact both licenses are very rare cases -- and only demonstrating
the weakness of the Open Source Definition (since it was written as a
guideline, not a definition). As "Open Source as in the OSD" was
trying to establish a marketing program for Free Software as defined
in the Free Software Definition maintained by the FSF.

Yes, these two exceptions to the general rule exist.

However: 45 of 47 licenses do not have that problem and they cover
over 99% of the codebase we're talking about. And the problems of the
APSL have been solved, so the old version will disappear eventually as
the license upgrade propagates.

Which leaves 1 license out of 47 standing as the exception to the rule
that the two are referring to identical licenses.


The confusion here is a good example of the typical confusion when
using the "Open Source" terminology. 

While you were talking about the two exception cases, the others were
referring to using the term "Open Source" as in "proprietary software
with some source code visible."

And that is not "Open Source as in the OSD" -- which is what I tried
to explain.

Regards,
Georg

-- 
Georg C. F. Greve                                 <greve at fsfeurope.org>
Free Software Foundation Europe	                 (http://fsfeurope.org)
GNU Business Network                        (http://mailman.gnubiz.org)
Brave GNU World	                           (http://brave-gnu-world.org)
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