[Glastonbury] free & open

[Andrew M.A. Cater]

On Fri, Sep 19, 2003 at 08:23:14PM +0100, Sean Miller wrote:
> > Much as I admire and have great respect for RMS, he's a complete and
> 
> RMS?
> 
rms - from his login at MIT in the days of the TMRC is:

Richard Stallman - hence the Debian package vrms (virtual Richard M. 
Stallman) which checks your machine for non-free packages and prints
a congratulatory message if you have none :)

Read lists.  Read up on the background to all this free software
long haired tree-hugging Linux shit.  Understand the philosophy behind 
the GPL and fight for copyleft - it may save your rights to use the code 
some day.

None of this can hurt anybody.  Knowledge is power, after all :)

Personally, even at work, I've tended to follow the American Department
of Defense - they've taken to using FLOSS (Free/Libre/Open Source 
Software).  "Open source" as a concept is a nightmare to explain
as even Bruce Perens now agrees.

Free - as in "Free to copy, modify, look at the code and distribute -
oh, and by the way, it doesn't cost you anything more than media costs"
is a fairly good mantra.  Debian main distribution is free in all these
senses, SuSE and Red Hat Advanced Server are not, for example.

BSD is also free, as are the licences for Apache and the Artistic 
Licence for Perl (though Perl is, strictly speaking, dual licenced)
so the GPL isn't the only game in town.

HTH,

Andy