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From: David Kramer <david at thekramers.net> Date: Sat, 14 Dec 2002 19:40:57 -0500 That is false, and is in fact the biggest area in which RMS and ESR disagree. RMS (and, by extention, the FSF), is really against charging for software. Period. He has slipped a little in the last year or so, but that has almost always been his position. Free as in Beer is just as important as Free as in Speech. I have heard it from his lips personally. I'm not entirely convinced by that, considering that the GNU project has long charged for tapes and such. From http://www.gnu.org/gnu/thegnuproject.html: I could have said, "Find a friend who is on the net and who will make a copy [of GNU Emacs] for you." Or I could have done what I did with the original PDP-10 Emacs: tell them, "Mail me a tape and a SASE, and I will mail it back with Emacs on it." But I had no job, and I was looking for ways to make money from free software. So I announced that I would mail a tape to whoever wanted one, for a fee of $150. In this way, I started a free software distribution business, the precursor of the companies that today distribute entire Linux-based GNU systems. In the same essay, RMS also cites as one of the essential freedoms of free software "You have the right to redistribute copies, either gratis or for a fee". Perhaps RMS has said that zero price is just as important as freedom, but I've never seen any confirmed example of that. I've certainly It is also against the GPL to not distribute, or make available, the source code for any product that has GPL code in it, including the source code for the non-GPL'ed parts. This is the silver bullet that keeps just barely missing M$FT. Making money off of distributing GPL software is not agains the GPL though. That's not true, either. Certainly any code that's a derivative work of code licensed under the GPL must itself be released under terms no less free than those of the GPL, but that only applies to derived works. It can't apply to works that aren't derived; the licensed is based on copyright law, not contract law. The GPL is cast in terms of "works" (in the copyright sense), not in terms of "products"; if a product is created by aggregation, or otherwise by avoiding derivation from GPL'ed code, it can be distributed under any terms the distributor pleases (that are consistent with any other applicable terms). -- Robert Krawitz <rlk at alum.mit.edu> Tall Clubs International -- http://www.tall.org/ or 1-888-IM-TALL-2 Member of the League for Programming Freedom -- mail lpf at uunet.uu.net Project lead for Gimp Print -- http://gimp-print.sourceforge.net "Linux doesn't dictate how I work, I dictate how Linux works." --Eric Crampton
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