Robert Schiele schrieb:
On Fri, Mar 24, 2006 at 11:50:37AM +0100, Siegbert Baude wrote:
B.Weber@warwick.ac.uk schrieb:
If you accept the pine licence as open source then windows is nearly open source, after all the kernel source code is available to partners and some academic institutions etc, but those with the source code would not be able to redistribute modified versions.
Come on, *everybody* can see the source of pine, that is the meaning of
Open source is not only about _looking_ at the source.
You are talking about the OSI definition of "open source", which already includes political goals for satisfying the needs of developpers. I was talking about the pure term "open source" as Joe Average understands it. Don't try to explain me the purpose of the OSI definition, I already know.
You might be satisfied by looking at a Rembrandt image or something like that but it is quite pointless to look at some source code if you are legally not allowed to do the changes you feel appropriate.
So I'm very glad Rembrandt didn't chose an OSI license for his work. I could hardly stand the rest of the world improving his pictures. ;-) (Your comparison didn't really hit the nail, did it?)
"open source". You are talking about developper's need to fork (that's
And the developer's view is the one that is relevant here. A user that is not fluent in programming languages cannot change anything anyway thus for him it does not matter whether something is open source or not but only whether it is free (as in free beer) or not.
The question is, what is here? If here is "SUSE Linux" I very well think, that the user's perspective is more important than the developper's point of view. Look at our frontpage: "We work together to create and distribute the world's most usable Linux." SUSE is about usability, not developper's needs. At least in my humble opinion. And that's my only reasoning to join the discussion here. I have the strange feeling, that usability is not the highest goal of SUSE anymore, and just wanted to make clear, that there are still users and admins out there, whose choice for SUSE was exactly based on usability instead of license dogmas.
what pine doesn't allow). Windows is a completeley different thing.
Maybe Windows is not a good example but Microsoft (or some other commercial companies) has some other products that are availlable as "Shared Source". I would not want to call this _open_ source although _everybody_ can look at it because you are not allowed to change the code in a free (as in free speech) way.
So we are just of different opinion here. Minix was "open source" in my definition and I was able to learn from it without the right to change it.
So placing anything that is not OSI compliant on CD6 is the smartest way to go. It does not hurt the user because he can just install it from CD6 and it keeps the base media clean from pseudo OSS software.
ACK. In this case it is not a problem, but I really would have an official statement of some SUSE guy, if usability stands against OSI (or kernel policies), what will win? Will SUSE become a second Debian? Ciao Siegbert