Is Fedora *really* Free?

[Les Mikesell]

On Thu, 2006-10-19 at 15:46 +0100, Scott van Looy wrote:
> >
> >>> Yet much less so than what GPL fanatics do to the word 'free'
> >>> to make it mean restricted...
> >>
> >> As in "You are free to do what you like with the code except add
> >> restrictions to its use"?
> >
> > As in "you can't redistribute this combined with anyone else's
> > work that has different ideas".  That is "my restrictions are
> > the only reasonable ones possible...".
> 
> Stops people taking what someone else wrote, adding a few lines and then 
> charging for it, doesn't it?

Yes, it stops that.  And if you are a user who needs those few lines
and willing to pay for the combination you are screwed.  Likewise
for anyone who will ever need code to talk to a lot of hardware, or
to work with a lot of media encoding, or any number of other operations
where the code author has made a different choice - regardless of your
own willingness to accommodate that choice.   That is, as a potential
user
you will never be able to have that combination of code distributed to
you.  Perhaps even worse, your networks will always be cluttered with
badly written code in places where the GPL restrictions kept better
components from being used.

-- 
  Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com