From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: * X-Spam-Status: No, score=1.3 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,INVALID_MSGID, MSGID_RANDY autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,577c9f9c0cdd76d X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public From: Robert Dewar Subject: Re: Help help.. please.i am totaly new in ada programing Date: 1999/11/03 Message-ID: <7vphsr$tlk$1@nnrp1.deja.com>#1/1 X-Deja-AN: 543947008 References: <7vnsco$o7s$1@nnrp1.deja.com> X-Http-Proxy: 1.0 x39.deja.com:80 (Squid/1.1.22) for client 205.232.38.14 Organization: Deja.com - Before you buy. X-Article-Creation-Date: Wed Nov 03 14:46:52 1999 GMT X-MyDeja-Info: XMYDJUIDrobert_dewar Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada X-Http-User-Agent: Mozilla/4.04 [en] (OS/2; I) Date: 1999-11-03T00:00:00+00:00 List-Id: In article , Preben Randhol 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 Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/ Before you buy.