Richard Stallman – "Free Software and Your Freedom" (Beijing, China)

Re:Richard Stallman – "Free Software and Your Freedom" (Beij... by mark_l_watson on Saturday May 17, 2014 @09:57AM (#7760128)

Gavin, I understand the FSF's position. Even though I am actually wearing a FSF thirty today, I disagree with their stance that other open source license are not useful. Really, it is up to creators to license code the way they want to.

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Re:Richard Stallman – "Free Software and Your Freedom" (Beij... by vezzy-fnord on Saturday May 17, 2014 @10:23AM (#7760190)

They don't have any such position, at least not so absolutist. In fact, that was the whole point behind LGPL, to bridge the gap between GPL and BSD licensing. RMS also approved of the Ogg Vorbis library using the BSD License.

They do make exceptions when there is strategic sense.

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Re:Richard Stallman – "Free Software and Your Freedom" (Beij... by chimeracoder on Saturday May 17, 2014 @11:20AM (#7760364)

> I disagree with their stance that other open source license are not useful

There are two inaccuracies with this statement:

1) The FSF does not disapprove of the use of non-copyleft free licenses. They encourage the GPL, but as pointed out below, they themselves have both released code under other licenses and approved of the use of other licenses.

2) You seem to have missed gavinpc's point, which is that the FSF is the Free Software Foundation, not the "Open Source Software Foundation". They don't say that "other open source licenses" aren't useful, because they don't refer to their own licenses as "open source" licenses. They dislike the term "open source" and don't use it themselves.

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