inode0 wrote:
On Wed, Jul 23, 2008 at 12:15 PM, Rahul Sundaram
<sundaram(a)fedoraproject.org> wrote:
> Alejandro Acosta wrote:
>> I saw the words "open source" a lot along many Fedora presentations,
but
>> my doubts still remain. Do we have any policy regarding Open Source and/or
>> Free Software? It is going to be hard to me to debate about freedom against
>> RMS so I would prefer only to talk about our project, but stating clearly
>> what we stand for.
> In the main documents and webpages, we have traditionally preferred to use
> free and open source or FOSS as a term to encompass both movements.
Understandable and seems fairly common among large distributions. This
term has always grated on me in the way saying squares and rectangles
would. If you are talking about squares say squares, if you are
talking about squares and rectangles just say rectangles. (No offense
to those who see a much bigger difference here. I see a bigger
difference too.)
FYI, RMS/FSF considers FOSS a acceptable term. In practice, it makes no
difference in Fedora.
Out of curiosity, are there any components of Fedora that are Open
Source but not Free Software?
In terms of licenses, there are very few differences. Fedora has
inherited a number of Perl components that are under Artistic License 1
which FSF considers potentially non-free as per
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/license-list.html#GPLIncompatibleLicenses
Tom Callaway talked with OSI and they have deprecated the license too as
stated in
http://opensource.org/licenses/artistic-license-1.0.php
While Fedora has for a while not accepted new software under this
license, there has been a long term effort to get existing components
relicensed which has been successful to a large extend. That effort is
coming to a close in Fedora 10
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/Artistic1Removal
After this effort is complete, there would be zero disparities.
Rahul