Re: [Fsuk-manchester] RMS on Swedish Pirate Party vs Free Software

[Simon Ward]

On Mon, Jul 27, 2009 at 09:59:24AM +0100, Matthew Larsen wrote:
> open-source. A database interface or code for a front-end to a business
> system I see no point in open-sourcing (and indeed, many businesses would
> prefer you *didn't* open-source that stuff).

I think you’ve missed the point Matt was making:  You can have internal
software, your database interface code, be free software, but just not
release it to the general public.

You might think that defeats the point of free software, but it really
doesn’t.  Free software only requires you give anybody you distribute
the software to the four freedoms.

Analogies are terrible I know, especially between software and hardware,
but if I give you a physical object you can look at it and take it apart
and look at it more to find out how it fits together or works, you can
modify it, you can use it even for different things than may have been
intended, and you can give it to someone else.  You don’t get to do all
of this if I don’t give you the object in the first place.

Software freedom does not mean an obligation to give software away, it
means that if you do give it to someone else you also allow them the
freedoms that would be expected from being given anything else.  Much of
the software that is private, limited only to distribution within a
company, and unreleased to the public, will stay that way.

Even when copyright no longer applies and software can be considered in
the public domain it does not mean it should automatically be released
to the public.  It means that if it is released, people can do (mostly)
what they like with it, including distribute it to others (a customer in
possession of now public domain software could release it to the public
if they wanted to.  In the original article, RMS proposed that source
code be escrowed until the end of the copyright term, but only for
released software.

Simon
-- 
A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a
simple system that works.—John Gall

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