David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
2009/3/9 Sam Liddicott sam@liddicott.com:
I'm puzzled - you say it is FUD; but then you seem to agree with him. How is it FUD?
The implication is that the OSI is not interested in software freedom because it disagrees with the FSF on one corner-case. This is historically and factually inaccurate.
Arguing about implications - in other words, arguing against things that no-one has written and one has imagined. That won't end well.
It's not just one corner-case: NASA, Reciprocal, Apple, Netscape... probably others. What does this mean?
OSI was the Open Source Initiative, an initiative to secure a trademark on "Open Source", to market free software. The initiative failed, the trademark is unobtainable and OSI should have dissolved instead of setting itself up as a bad advocacy-led mix of FSF and debian licence review processes.
Two other things:-
FSF never claimed FDL is a FS licence. I think it's wrong to have manuals which aren't FS, but we disagree on what software is. I also think it's wrong to give obnoxious ad clause support to legacy publishers, but FSF needs its manuals published.
Debian uses the DFSG as *guidelines* (the G), as practical checks of whether *software* (the S) meets the free software definition. Some debian developers are unhappy about OSI using a minimally-modified version the DFSG as a definition for licences instead of guidelines for software.
Hope that explains,