help-gnu-emacs
[Top][All Lists]
Advanced

[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

Re: What OS is used By Richard Stallman


From: tomas
Subject: Re: What OS is used By Richard Stallman
Date: Sun, 23 Sep 2018 15:59:47 +0200
User-agent: Mutt/1.5.21 (2010-09-15)

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

On Sun, Sep 23, 2018 at 11:14:16AM +0000, microsoft gaofei wrote:
> https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/categories.en.html  . I'm sorry about
> my lack of knowledge and bad awareness, I cannot understand the
> relationship between free software and other software. You said,
> nearly all free software is open source. It's too confusing for
> me because of the word "nearly": Not all free software is open-source.
> Can you find any real-world example of free but closed-source software?
> Can you find any real-world example of open-source but proprietary software?

This is difficult because "open source" can mean several things.
If you use the OSI's [1] definition of open source, then yes,
free software and open source are *technically* equivalent.

Ideologically, though, the emphasis of free software is on user's
freedom, thus a moral/social emphasis, whether open source concerns
itself more with the development model, thus has a more technical and
less social focus.

Open source was "created" because some fear that the ideological
positioning of free software might drive corporations away. Personally
I think this is a mistake, because corporations do have a social
responsibility, although many people don't want to see that.

There have been attempts to mimic the advantages of open source without
giving users freedom (e.g. Microsoft's several attempts at "shared
source" [2]).

Specifically I don't know about specific examples of open source software
(in the specific OSI sense) which can't be considered free software,
nor do I know about free software which doesn't fit the OSI definition
of open source -- although I'm always ready to learn something new.

Cheers
[1] https://opensource.org/faq#free-software
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source-available_software
- -- tomás
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.12 (GNU/Linux)

iEYEARECAAYFAlunnFMACgkQBcgs9XrR2kZ0vQCeLQVG/PES347hFKBn+F3Qj1wI
QXgAnj8EOAQqBCSi/JLW4xxUnZAVuQj/
=H0pK
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----



reply via email to

[Prev in Thread] Current Thread [Next in Thread]