[TOS] General vision: Free Software welcome here?

[Rob Cameron]

MJ,

I wonder what you would think of a request that the following web
pages be modified to give "open source software" equal billing
alongside "free software."
http://www.ttllp.co.uk/
http://mjr.towers.org.uk/
http://mjr.towers.org.uk/email.html

I think you would find it a pain and think it was unnecessary.   I would agree.

On Tue, Mar 24, 2009 at 7:12 AM, MJ Ray <mjr at phonecoop.coop> wrote:
> 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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-- 
Robert D. Cameron, Ph.D.
Professor of Computing Science
Simon Fraser University