Re: Help help.. please.i am totaly new in ada programing

[Robert Dewar <dewar@gnat.com>]

In article <m3vh7jesu9.fsf@kiuk0156.chembio.ntnu.no>,
  Preben Randhol <randhol@pvv.org> wrote:
> tmoran@bix.com writes:
>
> If "somenoun" is speech, isn't that understood differently
> than gratis?

Well maybe it depends on motives. We often find that people in
the business of selling proprietary software like to go out of
their way to try to confuse this issue. So perhaps if you are
in the business of selling copyrighted stuff, you would like
to create the same confusion for free speech :-)

What next? will people try to decide that "give me freedom
or give me death" is about getting your credit card bills
reduced :-)

Seriously, at this stage, the phrase free software is pretty
well established, and as I noted, we find these days that the
companies we deal with are much more aware and better educated
on this issue (if there are any residual concerns over free
software, it is the usual ones about licensing provisions, that
can easily be dealt with). Tom Moran (who incidentally is
involved in selling proprietary software :-) may be confused,
or insist on trying to confuse others, and indeed anyone can
use any language they like in any way they like.

But at this stage, the free software community has been largely
successful in getting people to understand that free when
applied to software is like free when applied to speech (as
Preben points out, the default meaning of the adjective free
does depend on the noun, and the goal here is to make sure that
the noun software is treated like speech here, and not like
beer :-). The word freeware, which is well established, is
unambiguous and refers to software that costs nothing (although
again, we note that those in the business of selling proprietary
software often like to obfuscate this issue, and insist for
example in referrring to GNAT as freeware :-) :-)

Actually the distinction is particularly important these days,
when a similar, but different notion of "open source software"
has appeared. These are overlapping concepts, but there can be
OSS that is not FS (there cannot be FS that is not OSS). The
reason is that some OSS licenses concentrate simply on making
the sources available, not on the more fundamental issue of
making sure that the recipient of the software can do anything
they like with it for their own use. For example, some OSS
licenses insist that any changes you make belong to the original
copyright holder. The distinction is an important one.

Why? Well one of the great advantages of free software for
serious commercial users is that it gives them maximum access to
the software they acquire, and makes sure that licensing
provisions will not stand in the way of that use. The
availability of sources is of course a key element, but if you
are limited in what you can do with sources, then there can be
problems (in one case I am familiar with, a vendor provided
sources to a customer, and later claimed that the customer could
not touch them, they were provided solely for the convenience of
onsite maintenance provided by vendor personel!) Now this of
course would be beyond the pale even for OSS, but it is a
reminder that availability of the sources is not enough on its
own!


Robert Dewar
Ada Core Technologies


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