[TOS] General vision: Free Software welcome here?

MJ Ray mjr at phonecoop.coop
Tue Mar 24 14:12:58 UTC 2009


Chris Tyler <chris at tylers.info> wrote:
> On Mon, 2009-03-23 at 13:12 +0000, MJ Ray wrote:
> > Hi, my company speaks about free software, or at least FOSS.  I see
> > various other threads also using "FOSS".  Are we welcome here?
>
> Everyone interested in teaching or supporting the teaching of
> community-based open source is absolutely welcome here. See the
> [[Taxonomy]] page on the wiki for clarification if desired.

That's disappointing.  It criticises "free" for being muddled
(freedom/price) but contained no similar criticism of "open"
(accessibility/visibility).

Personally, I'm tired of explaining why something's not open source
just because users can view its source code; and the 11-point Open
Source Definition is much longer and more difficult to remember than
the 4-point Free Software Definition (use, study, adapt and share).

> [proprietary product] he could not understand why I didn't consider it
> "free software" despite multiple conversations.

Could not or would not, I wonder...

> If you want to insert "FOSS" onto some of the wiki pages, feel free, but
> I think that the majority opinion is that we all understand what we're
> talking about regardless of the acronym used. Consequently, as the site
> administrator for teachingopensource.org, I have no intention of
> changing the wiki title, mailing list name, or domain name at this time.

OK.  Could we add another domain name and make the tools
virtual-hosted somehow (so that our audience see "FOSS" instead of
"OpenSource"), or does the project take a hard line on this?

Thanks,
-- 
MJ Ray (slef)
Webmaster for hire, statistician and online shop builder for a small
worker cooperative http://www.ttllp.co.uk/ http://mjr.towers.org.uk/
(Notice http://mjr.towers.org.uk/email.html) tel:+44-844-4437-237



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