[buug] (no subject)

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Johan Beisser (jb at caustic.org):

> To be honest, I used BSD/OS well until 2003.

Using legacy stuff is not the subject, here.  People are still using
SPARC1 gear.

Point is, nobody really gives a damn whether somebody has gone through Open
Group calesthenics to prove Single UNIX Specification test suites (and
of course paid Open Group a nice wad of money for the privilege).
Nobody even cares whether anyone has actually paid IEEE the much smaller
amount of money for full POSIX.1 compliance certification, either.

For one thing, it turns out that, like just about any technical standard
from a hyperactive, politicised committee, POSIX.1 includes a bunch of
elements that just done matter because they aren't used, and also that 
merely aiming at approximate POSIX.1 and being reported widely to have
done the job is good enough.

NetBSD does that, various Linuxes, sundry OpenSolaris flavours, and on
and on.

And _nobody_ gives a rat's ass who's still paying Open Group the
trademark licensing fees required to use the word "UNIX" in commercial 
product references.


> Okay, I've got to concede here. You're right, but that can be said
> about most technical and software terms in use by the lay-user.

Now, you're reaching.  Any term can be _misunderstood_ and misused.  
Some were never clear in the first place.  "Freeware" has always been
one of the latter -- and always will be.  Which is why smart people
eschew it and switch to more-useful distinctions that actually tell you
something worth knowing.


> >> "Open Source Software" has the vague definition of "Freeware" while
> >> not really being exclusive.
> >
> > You are flamboyantly mistaken, here.  Open source software has a formal,
> > highly useful, specific definition:  http://www.opensource.org/docs/osd
> 
> It's also modern, and postdates the early use of the term. 

Of the term "_freeware_"?  Sure.  But, of the term "open source" in the
context of software?  No.  Not in any real sense.

About two or three times in OSI history, somebody with a grudge has come
onto the OSI "license-discuss" mailing list seeking to prove to them
that OSI had no right to define what "open source" means because, he
said, somebody or other had once use the term and concept together prior
to OSI's founding.

Never mind that that's just _a bit_ illogical.  One of them was
energetic enough to actually grep through lots of archives and found, if
memory serves, an astonishing two instances of near-hit citations on
Usenet, just before OSI's founding.  Of course, neither of those guys
had actually attempted to define a category.  They were just talking
about software, so it was a graze against the issue that OSI soon took
charge of.


> I heard "freeware" in the early 80s, often in the term of games. Same
> goes with "shareware."

Sure.  So did I.  I'm not sure what your point is.  Yes, these were
terms of some antiquity, just as you and I are obviously of some
antiquity.  (But were you a Homebrew Computer Club member?  ;->  )


> No, I just see the two as very different. Freeware implies something
> different than Open Source software to me.

Um, I never claimed the two were anything alike.  I am astonished you
should think I did.


> "Shareware" implied, at least to me as a teen, that you should pay for
> it. PKZip/PKunzip for DOS were an excellent example of this.

Yes, yes, yes.  We know that.  In some cases, there was a legal
obligation to pay, but not enforced by the software.  In other cases,
there was a legal obligation, _and_ enforced in some way by the
software.  In others, there was no obligation, just persuasion.

In no case was anything else useful implied by the term "shareware",
except that impliedly you also had the permission to redistribute the
thing to others, sometimes burdened by absurd restrictions to that
right, other times not.


> >> Freeware was the "free to use, free as in beer" software that many
> >> people used.
> >
> > That is one thing people have been known to use the term to mean.
> > There are others.  And the term as you construe it is fuzzy, because it
> > says nothing about the legal right of modification, independent
> > development, and distribution of derivative works.
> 
> I'm not sure you have to define those aspects for something to be
> "freeware." 

I never so asserted.  I said, for lack of saying anything about those
utterly crucial aspects of software (among other reasons), the term is
basically useless because it's too vague and tells you little that
really matters.



> I'm a pragmatist. "Do I have to pay the author cash for the software
> itself?"

Well, I sure hope that's not _all_ you care about concerning software.

For example, if you care about yourself and others having the right to
maintain the software, irrespective of whether you were able to acquire
it for free, then you give a damn (to that degree) whether it's
proprietary or not.

If "pragmatist" means "doesn't care whether something is fixable after
it ceases to work in a changing environment", then count me out.


> On the same note, the license itself will define the rest. I don't
> want to start a license debate, but defining something as "Free to
> use, modify, and distribute the modified works" doesn't exclude it
> from being "Freeware." 

I never so asserted.  Did you think I did?  Try re-reading.