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 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.
"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.
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 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. Robert -- Robert Schiele Tel.: +49-621-181-2214 Dipl.-Wirtsch.informatiker mailto:rschiele@uni-mannheim.de "Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur."