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On 28 December 2012 12:41, Philip Hudson <phil.hudson@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > This crystallizes some worries and doubts I have about this and other LUGs > I've been involved with: A fair point and well made, although personally I try to use FOSS to distinguish against "free" which means to most people "Oh, I don't have to pay for it?" and nothing else. That perception won't change. FOSS is also free, but not all free is FOSS. As you'll guess by now, I like FOSS (I've released software and source under this, and previously as "Public Domain" when I was coding for Fidonet and DOS in the early and mid 90s. Now I don't generally bother because there are far more, and better, coders and better distribution channels so anything I do will have been done better by somebody else). Surprised yer chap doesn't mention FOSS as a handy acronym - seems ideal to me! What does annoy me more than anything is when "Free" projects try to monetize themselves, or put barriers in the way of freedom by protecting some small but critical part of the code that prevents recompiling, or makes it deliberately obfuscated so nobody else can be bothered to compile. (I site the windows versions of Xchat for this. Free under linux, but successively difficult to build under Windows that the author sells the product). If you want to make money out of software, and I have no objection to that AT ALL, then do it honestly and sell the thing outright where it can stand or fall on its merits. Don't blur the "free" software market with something that's not. This is another reason why I value Debian, that the repo maintainers make a conscious effort to separate what is and what is not, often to levels that might frustrate the user, but ultimately protect them. Unless I deliberately add a non-free repos, I can be totally sure what I install is free and FOSS. I don't ever bother to get the sources and recompile, but it matters to me that I could if I wanted to. -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/listfaq