Hewlet Packard and Linux

[Frank Carmickle]

Ladies and Gentlemen of the speakup community

On Sat, 25 Aug 2001, Gregory
Nowak wrote:
> and since it is open source,
> we can engineer it exactly to please us
> (unlike windows).

I would like to make it very clear that there are many open source
offerings in the world.  However just because you have access to the
source doesn't mean you can do with it as you like.  The GNU GPL gives
us ownership of the software we use.  It allows us to change it and if we
do change it we are obligated to contribute those changes back in to the
community.  The Microsoft shared source program is one example of shared
source that isn't gonna get you anywhere.  The reason why we have what we
have today is because the software we use is "free software."  This is
very different from open source.  A few of the programs that are discussed
on this list are open source and yet are not free software.  The
xwindowing system is one of these such things.  As is pine.  What this
means is that you can have the source code but you may or may not
distribute your changes.  Also it is not required of you to distribute
source for these programs if you desire not to.  This is how many
commercial UNIX systems have sold modified x packages and not included the
source for there modifications.  This imho is a problem.  People have
worked very hard to make free software what it is today.  If you want to
spit in the face of those people that's fine.  But let me warn you.  This
freedom that you enjoy may not be around for long if you don't contribute
back to the free software community.  You may find that no longer will you
have the latest and greatest software because others will also start to
distribute software which is not free.  

So let us be very clear when we talk about open source vs. free
software.  They are two different things.  Open source software does
not,may I repeat , does not insure that the next guy won't take your
source run off with it make changes and not contribute the source back to
the community.  This imho is a big problem.

I encourage all of you to listen to Richard Stallman's arguments about why
software should be free.  Have a look at 
ftp://linux-speakup.org/pub/linux/goodies/audio-files/ where there are two
ogg files called rms-nyu1.ogg and rms-nyu2.ogg.  I am working on making
smaller ones available.

-- 
     Frank Carmickle
phone:     412 761-9568
email:     frankiec at dryrose.com