Free Software audit update

[Arjan van de Ven]

On Mon, 2006-08-21 at 00:02 -0400, Michael Tiemann wrote:
> On Mon, 2006-08-21 at 05:50 +0200, Ralf Corsepius wrote:
> 
> > > 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"
> 
> Ralf,
> 
> I disagree.  Fedora was constituted as a free software distribution.
> There were many struggles and false starts along the way, and we all
> have the battle scars to prove that.  But things are getting better, and
> now we are in a position to make good on a promise we made at the start
> of the project.  Religion has nothing whatsoever to do with this.
> Courage, commitment, freedom, and accountability have everything to do
> with this.

in this case of openmotif, the open motif license, when used in fedora,
allows for modifications and distributions of those modifications both
in binary and source code form. That fits some peoples definition of
free software. 

What it doesn't allow is taking openmotif and putting it in, say,
windows. Or in a Linux distro that integrates binary components in the
kernel (but arguably copyright law doesn't allow that either ;). This
clause is only slightly different than clause 2 of the GPL, and really
only matters for non-Fedora. As such I agree with Ralf that this is a
religious belief, not about "free software" per se.