Date: Sun, 14 Jun 1998 20:36:56 -0700 From: don morrison <dmorrisn@u.washington.edu> To: Brett Glass <brett@lariat.org>, chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Draft of Nader letter Message-ID: <3.0.5.32.19980614203656.00814950@dmorrisn.deskmail.washington.edu> In-Reply-To: <199806150248.UAA06154@lariat.lariat.org> References: <3.0.5.32.19980614182616.0080c6c0@dmorrisn.deskmail.washing ton.edu> <199806150000.SAA04235@lariat.lariat.org>
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>The description of FreeBSD said it was in the "public domain" (which This is bean counting. The letter was not meant to be read as a legal document. That's why the author decided not to bore the reader with the exact terms of the BSD and GNU licenses. If you were in the linux camp you would likely complain about how the GNU license was misrepresented. The point is, it wasn't the topic of the letter, so statements about licenses and so forth were kept to a minimum. The statement "public domain" was made for its connotations--to give the reader the feeling that the software is for free use by anybody. And it is. It did not bother me at all that he failed to mention that the BSD sources must retain the copyright notices and acknowledments to the regents of the University of California, at Berkeley. This is entirely irrelavent to the purpose of the letter. >is simply wrong) and described it as "non-copylefted" (true, but showing >a bias toward Linux and the GPL). It also equated the "project" with the >OS. To me this doesn't show a bias, it simply shows that the author is oriented with the copyleft, and ignorant of the BSD license and that he's trying to indicate that to you. As for the project being equated with the OS, when he refers to FreeBSD, keep in mind that he's referring to a particular *BSD; he speaks of Linux more in general. It seems correct to me, then, for him to have made the distinction in that way that FreeBSD can be thought of as one particular project, whereas, linux must be thought of as a bunch of distributions. This is just a bit of terminology. The importance is the mental picture. What was wrong with the picture it gave you? There are a number of things I could have said in _this_ message if I wanted to be ultra-precise, but I did not, because I decided to favor readability. This does not mean my message lacked proper content nor validity. It's just called communication. And I think my message has good intent, just as Mr. Nader and Mr. Love's did. Thanks for listening. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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