Free Software audit update

[Ralf Corsepius]

On Mon, 2006-08-21 at 08:30 +0200, Hans de Goede wrote:
> 
> Ralf Corsepius wrote:
> > On Sun, 2006-08-20 at 21:09 +0530, Rahul wrote:
> >> Arjan van de Ven wrote:
> >>>>> To me, dropping OpenMotif would be real regression.
> >>>>>
> >>>> Clear cut violation of guidelines. Openmotif is proprietary software.
> >>> well openmotif is a "it's free for open source" license... so to call it
> >>> proprietary... is not entirely fair either.
> > ACK
> > 
> >> Ok my wording might not have been entirely appropriate but it doesnt 
> >> meet the packaging guidelines for either Free software 
> >> (http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/motif.html) or open source software 
> >> (http://www.opengroup.org/openmotif/faq.html) and should be removed from 
> >> the distribution.
> > Yes, OpenMotif is not a copyright nor a legal issue. It's a religious
> > one. It's licence doesn't meet the some people's "confession/belief"
> > 
> 
> I completely do not understand (nor share) your point of view here.
> Fedora has always been about building a distro which is 100.1 % free (as
> in freedom) and thus allows other to pick it up and do anything with it
> they like including selling it (modified or not) building proprietary
> stuff on top of it etc.

> To quote the opengroups motif faq (linked above) on this:
> "Open Motif source code and binaries can be distributed royalty free
> under The Open Group Public License as long as the operating system upon
> which Open Motif is running meets the OSI's Open Source Definition"
1. Fedora is based on the OSI-definition itself => Non-issue

2. royalty-free == licence fees ... RH business objective.
Non-issue to Fedora itself.

3. If this was an issue to the opengroup, it's them who would have to
sue RH (Who shipped OpenMotif as part of their $$$$ commercial linuxes)
They have not done so for many years.

> Now royalty free does not sound very free software / oss to me.
Yes, it's "religion". They are following a different OpenSource
model/religion than Fedora/RH.

> If you disagree feel free to submit it to that other repo, I might
> even help out by reviewing it.
Well, things aren't as simple as you think. First of all a lesstif
package must not replace OpenMotif, but be designed to be installed in
parallel to OpenMotif. Second, I would have to rebuild several packages
from Core and from Extras.

Ralf