1. Re: Why We Must Fight UCITA
On Thu, 3 Feb 2000 09:39:41 +1300, The Johnson Family <thedjs at INAME.COM>
wrote:
>Doesnt this strike anyone as a bit odd that all of this is happening, and
>yet it is not all over the news? Half the links in the message dont exist,
>and the Electronic Frontier Foundation doesnt mention UCITA at all. Anyway,
>what has DVD rom file formats got to do with software licenses for liability
>of faults in software? Also, whoever wrote the addenums at the bottom has no
>idea what they are talking about - the Free Software movement is distinct
>from the open source movement - the Free Software Movement promises Free
>Software, whereas the Open Source movement promises freely available source
>code. So yes, Java is free software, so is Netscape (now).
>Sounds like a hoax to me, folks, but if it is its the most convincing one
>I've come across.
>
>Nick
>P.S. I might be totally wrong, so please dont flame me.
www.4cite.org "appears" to be legit with a short but fairly impressive list of
members. And yes, the Open Source movement does NOT represent "free"
software. To use Open Source, you must contribute back items based on
that Open Source. Free software is just that. It may be used in any way
for any purpose without restriction or copyrite issues. It may even be
included in a commercial product and with modest mods be considered
proprietary again. There are several versions of Open Source, the most
important and global one being the "copyleft". Neither Netscape nor JAVA
are free in any but a financial sense. There are strict intellectual property
rights reserved on both of those, the chief being copyrite. I understand
that there are some patents involved, also.
The FSF and the OSI are not the same, even though they cooperate on
many issues. They are found respectively at www.fsf.org and
www.opensource.org and there are others with similar goals. These are
the two major ones.
Everett L.(Rett) Williams
rett at gvtc.com
