|
From: | Stuart Ballard |
Subject: | Re: org.omg link on Classpath homepage |
Date: | Wed, 22 Oct 2003 09:45:16 -0400 |
User-agent: | Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.4) Gecko/20031010 Debian/1.4-6 |
Andrew Haley wrote:
FSF pages don't link to unfree software projects. It seems that OMG is not be an unfree software project, because "Implementations of the OMG specifications - such as Object Request Brokers, IDL compilers, and UML-based modeling tools - are not produced by OMG. They are, instead, produced by software vendors or suppliers..."
But the link is provided specifically to get some software that *is* produced by the OMG, and is non-free.
I see three distinct issues here:1) The link doesn't actually take you to a place where you can get the software in question, so it's pretty useless as a link anyway.
2) The link is in a section labelled "providers for free core packages", but the software in question is not free. You could argue that "free" in this context means zero-cost, but on a GNU project such usage is at best VERY ambiguous and at worst outright misleading.
3) GNU projects aren't supposed to link to non-free software, so the link shouldn't exist in the first place. A link to OMG *could* be legitimate, if it was in the context of "the people who define the CORBA specification, including the org.omg packages". But even though the OMG is not in itself a non-free software project, I can't see how "go to the OMG to get this software", when the software in question is non-free, is not a link to non-free software.
To fix 3, the link must be removed entirely. If for some reason 3 doesn't need to be fixed (eg I'm misinterpreting GNU project policy), at least 1 and 2 should be.
Stuart. -- Stuart Ballard, Senior Web Developer FASTNET - Web Solutions (215) 283-2300, ext. 126 www.fast.net
[Prev in Thread] | Current Thread | [Next in Thread] |