Is Fedora *really* Free?

[Scott van Looy]

Today Les Mikesell did spake thusly:

> On Thu, 2006-10-19 at 15:46 +0100, Scott van Looy wrote:
>>>
>>>>> Yet much less so than what GPL fanatics do to the word 'free'
>>>>> to make it mean restricted...
>>>>
>>>> As in "You are free to do what you like with the code except add
>>>> restrictions to its use"?
>>>
>>> As in "you can't redistribute this combined with anyone else's
>>> work that has different ideas".  That is "my restrictions are
>>> the only reasonable ones possible...".
>>
>> Stops people taking what someone else wrote, adding a few lines and then
>> charging for it, doesn't it?
>
> Yes, it stops that.  And if you are a user who needs those few lines
> and willing to pay for the combination you are screwed.  Likewise
> for anyone who will ever need code to talk to a lot of hardware, or
> to work with a lot of media encoding, or any number of other operations
> where the code author has made a different choice - regardless of your
> own willingness to accommodate that choice.   That is, as a potential
> user
> you will never be able to have that combination of code distributed to
> you.  Perhaps even worse, your networks will always be cluttered with
> badly written code in places where the GPL restrictions kept better
> components from being used.

Yes. I'm constantly hampered under the GPL by closed source binaries that 
load into the open source framework that is the kernel...

The GPL doesn't stop you writing a few lines that talk to a GPLd bit of 
code as a standalone and charging for it, it just stops you distributing 
that free code as part of something that isn't GPLd

-- 
Scott van Looy - email:me at ethosuk.org.uk | web:www.ethosuk.org.uk
site:www.freakcity.net - the in place for outcasts since 2003
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