Les wrote:
On Fri, 2008-04-25 at 13:45 -0500, Les Mikesell wrote:
Why should I be interested in a distribution that makes it
difficult for me to make my own choices about whether a license
>> is acceptable or not? I don't have a problem with downloading
>> my own copy of any >> particular code from any particular
>> place under any conditions that I find acceptable.
But that is the problem. The folks with proprietary want to limit your
use to only the systems they have chosen to support, thus you can end up
with instruments or software that you have purchased that will not run
when the OS changes.
That's hardly unique to proprietary software. I once relied heavily on
CIPE as a VPN, but FC2 just dumped it with no replacement. Yes, I could
have kept all the broken pieces of the source code...
Furthermore their licenses forbid you from reverse
engineering the code to figure out how to make it work some where else,
and the owner of the proprietary OS won't let you do any reverse
engineering legally to figure out how to interface to the software or
hardware he/she/it chooses to no longer support.
I'm perfectly willing to take the chance that if I need something there
will be a proprietary vendor. Aside from it being a silly argument
particularly when we are starting from a point where the free version is
the one that doesn't work, why is it anyone else's business?
> Thus you are obsoleted
with no legal recourse.
Fedora is hardly in a position to talk about obsolescence being a
problem since they force it on everyone with every version.
Those lovely sites where you download such
utilities are often legally not clean to use either, depending upon the
laws that the various entities have seen fit to pass.
Ummm, we were talking about Sun Java, here. Remember, the one that
defines the standard. The one you can download for free from their own
web site. Fedora is the site that ships the non-conforming version and
the one that is going to be obsolete.
Finally your own
documents, code and other encoded data may be unaccessable to you
either, because the formatting, encoding, encryption or compression may
be proprietary and non disclosed with the attendant no reverse
engineering clauses, leaving you without access even to your own
material.
Again - Sun Java. The programming language. The thing that everyone
other than Sun has tried to corrupt by making incompatible versions that
suit their own agendas better. Do you really expect fedora to ship
utilities to fix the programs you wrote earlier under their
non-conforming version to run under the real thing when they switch?
That is why these licenses, and the subject of libre or free software is
important.
Following standards is what is important and what prevents it from being
a problem when you switch components. The version that fedora ships is
a non-standard one. They aren't doing anyone any favors by making it
difficult to use the real one.
--
Les Mikesell
lesmikesell@xxxxxxxxx
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