Re: [tlug] linux in Japanese schools

["Fergal Daly" <fergal@example.com>]

On 06/01/07, Curt Sampson <cjs@example.com> wrote:
> Now, I (perhaps naively) interpret "free beer" as "you don't have to pay
> money for it," and "free speech" as "you can do what you want." But it
> seems to me that the GPL can be summarized as, "the software will always
> be free of charge, and we place restrictions on the receivers to make
> that so," and the BSD licence can be summarised as, "you can do what you
> want with it, even charge people for variants." So wouldn't that mean
> that the GPL is "free as in beer," and the BSD license is "free as in
> speech"?
>
> Why is it claimed that the GPL is "free as in speech" when it places
> more restrictions on the freedom of the users of the software than the
> BSD (or many other) open source licenses?

I think what you have done here is show that the "free as in speech"
analogy does not hold particularly when you make detailed comparisons
and I agree with you. Howeve I think the reason it's used is because
free speech is a fundamental right and should be supported on
principle even if you disagree with the speech. That is how RMS and
the Free Software people feel about GPL style Freedom - they argue
that the right to study and alter the source code should be qa
fundamental right and that nobody has the right to ship you a binary
with no chance of modification.

So while other licenses are more free for various interpretations of
"free", they generally aren't the result of a principled stand taken
by the authors of the license.

Perhaps you could stretch the analogy a bit and say that BSD is like
speech that is entirely unrestricted, including the ability to freely
lie, slander and generally say bad things without being held to
account. That is not the kind of "free speech" that is supported by
human rights advocates.

But really, forget the details and just think of the link between Free
Software and Free Speech as opinions on fundamental rights rather than
as things that work in roughly the same way,

F