2 ms·

>Free Software doesn't have to be licensed under the GPL. Yes, I understand that but using RMS's criteria in his 2007 essay (subsection "Practical Differences

by jasode 7y ago

>Free Software doesn't have to be licensed under the GPL. Yes, I understand that but using RMS's criteria in his 2007 essay (subsection "Practical Differences between Free Software and Open Source"), my 1992 software (without strong copyleft protection) would be "open source" and not "free software". My point is that I called it "free software" even though it violates RMS's definition because the alternative label of "open source" didn't gain currency yet. Also, the "free as in libre vs free as in beer" wasn't a well-known meme in 1992 either: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=free+as+in+beer&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=15&smoothing=3 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=free+as+in+bee...

tuukkah 7y ago
Which criterion did your software violate in RMS's definition—I fail to see anything applicable in the subsection that you point to?
- jasode 7y ago
  >Which criterion did your software violate in RMS's definition When I gave away my software for free (e.g. on a disk), it would have files such as: - foobar.exe (requires non-free proprietary Microsoft C compiler to rebuild this exe -- because of MS specific API calls) - foobar.c (had some proprietary C code in it) Basically, a user could run my software for $0, but they couldn't rebuild the executable using non-free tools. But in 1992, I wasn't aware of RMS's philosophy about "free as in libre" so I (and many others) just called it "free software".