Re: [Fsfe-uk] BECTA discriminate against FLOSS?

[Chris Croughton]

On Sun, Jan 04, 2004 at 10:46:01PM +0100, Mark Preston wrote:

> It may well be that VB programmers produce a lot of free, as in unlicensed,
> public domain type software, but whether it can be described as 
> completely free code is debatable.

The code is completely free.  Whether it will run without help from
non-free components is a different matter.

> OSS projects generally prefer Linux or BSD because it has been
> observed in practice (*eg Welsh **PHLS*, reported at NHS session
> *OSHCA* 2001, London)
> http://www.*oshca*.org/docs/Open_Source-Henry_Ray.pdf
> <http://www.oshca.org/docs/Open_Source-Henry_Ray.pdf> that the
> efforts of disentangling proprietary licensing of components supplied
> as part of Windows programming languages is large and may form more
> of the work than writing the software. This has been called a problem
> of "defenestration".

Indeed.  But that is always a problem when you use someone else's
components, look at the trouble KDE had because the Qt and GPL licences
were incompatible (the Qt licence bent, or they went to dual lincencing,
or something like that), it was illegal to actually link the product
with the required libraries.  The BSD type licences are compatible with
anything, which is why I use that (with a waiver for the "advertising
clause" that distributing my source with its copyright etc. intact
absolves the user from putting anything in the documentation).

> With a GPL OS this is not an issue. I am involved in a project that
> uses a remastered Knoppix CD and relies entirely on FLOSS based
> software.  Sometimes it is not so obvious how free/open source
> solutions differ from closed-source software, but it is crystal-clear
> that a product such as this would not have been possible if we relied
> on close-source alternatives. Can you imagine negotiating a licence
> from Microsoft to remaster a bootable Windows-based CD?

Not a problem for me (or for most of the VB programmers I know), /all/
of my released code is source-only.  I don't even provide binaries or
object files, let alone complete operating systems.  Even GNU/Linux
distributions can run into problems, for ages Debian couldn't distribute
KDE because of the problems above.

Chris C