On Monday 17 May 2004 09:23 am, Rodolfo J. Paiz wrote: > > I've read a great deal of pro/con on this list about NVIDIA issuing > closed-source binary drivers and had not formed my own opinion yet. > I think we need to remind the newcomers of the importance of FREE SOFTWARE versus OPEN SOURCE versus CLOSED SOURCE PROPRIETARY SOFTWARE. It seems that those people who don't care are the same people who don't read the licenses and don't understand the implications of their decisions. I will try to show you what you are getting when you receive software under any of these agreements. Richard Stallman is pedantic (in the negative sense) but he does a very good job of being the "prophet" in our community, and you better listen when he speaks, at least to understand the full implications of your actions. I'll try to summarize what he has been saying this whole time. PROPRIETARY SOFTWARE is not open for tampering. You get software (usually for a price) and you are only allowed to use it in specific situations under specific circumstances. Violating the license makes you a criminal. You can and people do go to jail and serve time for violating these licenses. There is an organization called the BSA (Business Software Alliance) that is actively seeking people who knowingly or unwittingly violate these agreements. They force these businesses either to cough up extra cash or to face federal prosecution. (There is athird option: throw away all the proprietary software, but they don't present that for obvious reasons.) The act of giving software to your friends can be a violation of most proprietary software agreements. Some software you can't even sell to a friend. The companies that peddle this software has gone so far as to treat everyone like a criminal, requiring you to prove that you have a valid license and that you are in accordance with the license by entering codes or validating hardware. (Windows XP for example.) OPEN SOURCE software is much better. The software is open for inspection. This is good because most proprietary licenses forbid you even trying to understand what the software actually does. Many Open Source (or so-called) licenses do not allow you to modify or modify and distribute the software. Open Source also includes all Free Software by nature. Just keep in mind that Open Source software sometimes has more restrictions than Free Software does. FREE SOFTWARE (the pedantic kind) guarantees you several freedoms that Open Source softare cannot 100% guarantee, and proprietary software usually strictly forbids. Note that Free Software is not Freeware. Freeware is software you can obtain 'gratis' or without paying anyone. The "free" in Free Software is the "free" as in freedom or liberty. You may have to pay to get a hold of Free Software. The guaranteed freedoms are (from gnu.org): 0. The freedom to run the program, for any purpose (on any hardware, in any configuration, etc...) 1. The freedom to study how the program works, and to adapt it to your needs. (Access to the source is a precondition for this.) This means you can read and modify the source code and recompile it. 2. The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help you neighbor. 3. The freedom to improve the program and release the improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits. The GPL in particular puts some restrictions on software designed to procure these freedoms indefinitely. Namely, while you can sell the software, you must distribute the source code and license it under a compatible license to those you sell the software to. This in effect gives you freedoms 1, 2, and 3. You also can't restrict the use of the software or encumber them with patents that have incompatible restrictions. The other restrictions are mostly obvious and you can read about them in the license itself. LINUX and the GNU SOFTWARE that runs on it are a direct result of the GPL. Linux, and the GNU tools used to build and run Linux systems are all licensed under the GPL. Most of the other software on your Linux system is licensed under the GPL. Other software may be licensed under a BSD type license (do anything you want with this but you have to say it comes from us). Richard Stallman doesn't like the BSD license because it allows people to take the software and close it off with their improvements. In other words, derivatives of BSD licensed software may not be Free Software, while GNU software and all of its derivates will always be Free Software. This is a minor quibble, and there are a large number of people that don't like the restrictions of the GPL, so it goes both ways. If it weren't for the BSD and Linux and Gnu communities, and countless other communities, collectively the "Free Software community", you would not have the sum total of software you have today on Fedora. It is because of this freedom that Linux can be rock-solid in a variety of situations. It is because of thise freedom that Linux 2.6 is so far ahead of 2.4, by orders of magnitude. On an OS level, Windows has been superseded by Linux a long time ago. How many architectures does Windows OS run on? How many partition formats does Windows OS support? What hardware does Windows OS support? Linux beats Windows by miles and miles in each of these categories. Take any piece of software on your system and you will see that there is a community behind it developing the software furiously, at a pace quality, and consistency that no company could ever hope to match. As the number of users increase, as the demand for a particular feature grows, the software gets written and the bugs are patched. This system will scale infinitely. -- Jonathan Gardner jgardner@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
