Living together BUT not married: RR/MC and Linux

[Richard Gaskin]

Dan Shafer wrote:
> Richard....
> 
> I know you know this, but just to keep the conversation clear, "open  
> source" doesn't mean "free of charge." Not  on any level.

As Richard Stallman patiently explained it over dinner in Chinatown to 
me once, there's "free" as in "gratis" and "free" as in "freedom", and 
open source means both.

Under most open sources licenses in some circumstances you can charge 
for the object code, but the sources must still be available so the only 
difference between gratis and non-gratis is five minutes to run the make 
file.

> A lot of open source software is available for free. Some isn't  (MySQL 
> comes to mind immediately). 

Review the licenses for MySQL.  There are two.  One is proprietary, and 
carries a fee.  The other is free of charge and the source is open and 
modifiable, but only within the confines of the GPL.

So the open source version of MySQL is definitely free, in both senses 
of the word.  But proprietary use is governed by the proprietary non-GPL 
license.

> But lots and lots of programmers  make lots and lots of money *using*
> open source and *that's*  generally the requirement governments are
> placing on these projects.  IOW, they don't insist the software they
> buy be free of charge, just  built on freely distributable bases.

That may be, and there may be variances from government to government.

But the bottom line for us Rev developers is that if a customer requires 
a truly open source solution then the source must be open -- that's not 
the case with Rev, Windows, or OS X, so it rules out solutions dependent 
on any of those packages.

--
  Richard Gaskin
  Managing Editor, revJournal
  _______________________________________________________
  Rev tips, tutorials and more: http://www.revJournal.com