Re: [Fsfe-uk] Clarification needed

[Alex Hudson]

On Tue, 2002-03-26 at 07:29, John Dean wrote:
> So basically what you are say is that the UK members of theKompany team 
> would not be welcome?

Okay, firstly, don't take what I say as anything other than my opinion -
this isn't an official statement from the AFFS you know ;) In terms of
whether or not you would be welcome, well, this is a two pronged thing.

In terms of individual members, I don't believe we've ever discussed a
membership mechanism other than a completely inclusive one: there are no
planned barriers for joining. Being a member of AFFS is nothing more
than saying "I support the AFFS". So, I suppose even Bill Gates could
join... I don't think we're planning on a hypocrisy test :) If we were,
that would pretty much rule out all software engineers - sadly, the
majority of people writing code in this country aren't writing Free
code.

In terms of corporate members, I would say the position may be less
clear. Having company members reflects more on the organisation, and if
theKompany was allowed to join the AFFS that would be more troublesome, 
if only from a political point of view. Certainly, the statements by
Shawn in relation to his position on the GPL don't make it easy, since
one of the things that the AFFS believes is that Free Software (and, by
extension, software covered by the GPL) is commercializable. Since we're
not looking at taking corporate members for a good while yet, this point
is kind of moot anyway. 

I know licensing is a dull area, but that's to the heart of what the
AFFS exists for - the licence is what dictates whether software is Free
or not. For example, we can get the source code to Solaris fairly
easily. That doesn't make it Free, and it doesn't mean that Sun support
Free Software (or even "open source", if you go by opensource.org).

Take the example below:

> > > "You may not distribute any changes you make without those changes being
> > > accepted back by theKompany.com and incorporated into the Software
> > > Product"
> > >
> > > The violates section 4 of the Open Source definition. [...]
> 
> We took this position to ensure that changes are in fact contributed back 
> and not just taken without the permission of the author. This in fact 
> happened in the case of Max Judin's KDE Studio

Okay, the change was made to ensure you get changes back. Let's not
argue about that. But, that means that if theKompany refuse to accept
changes, then the change cannot be distributed. So, essentially, you are
relying on theKompany to continue to act in good faith - if theKompany
ever decided it no longer wanted people distributing changes to it's
products, it can stop that quite easily. This is one of key points of
Free Software - you're not relying on the good will of others to
exercise your freedoms. 

To go back to your original point, if we were not going to make you, or
other members of theKompany UK, welcome as members of the AFFS, then we
wouldn't be accepting membership from loads of other people either. I
may be being presumptious, but I don't think we're going to do that.
theKompany doesn't really come into it - you're the member, not your
job. But, I would also say that it may well be that our idea of Free
Software is not the same as yours - you may want to look more closely at
our aims and beliefs to be sure that you're signing up to something you
do genuinely support.

Cheers,

Alex.

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