On Wed, 6 Sep 2000, Ruairi Newman wrote:
> I don't see where he's coming from to be honest, to my mind open source
> software is reusable by whomever wants to reuse it and in whatever way
> he/she/they want to reuse it.
>
that attitude is exactly what pisses RMS off. open source software is
not re-usable by whoever for whatever however!
All this software is *not* in the public domain. It is copyrighted and
you must have a licence to use it or else you are pirating it. A lot
of open-source software happens to fall under the GPL. The GPL places
a lot of *restrictions* on what you may or may not do.
Copying MS Office for a friend is illegal because the licence
forbids it, and for the same reason linking GPL code to non-GPL code
is also forbidden and illegal[1].
Even worse the KDE crowd took other people's GPL code and incorporated
it without permission into a non-GPL work!
> Has RMS finally lost the plot?
no. you don't understand the GPL.
> Or is this his way of "getting his own
> back" at KDE for using QT which wasn't originally GPL'd?
>> Rgds,
>> Ruairi
>>
--paulj
[1]. with some exceptions, eg for 'system' libraries.
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