[OSCOM] OSCOM, OSI, open source, free software (was: ANN: Magnolia 3.0...)

On 6/22/06, Michelle Heizer <[email protected]> wrote:
> Michael Wechner wrote:
> > well, OSCOM decided some time ago to accept the OSI definition, which is
> > clear.

Hi,

I'm not really involved in OSCOM, more an interested party in
collaboration attempts between free software (using that expression
just to mix things up ;) projects.

I hope I too can clear up a few misunderstandings.

> Thanks for clearing that up. I did not know that OSCOM was limited to
> the OSI definition because when I joined I was told that all open source
> licenses would be accepted here.

The OSI is not very limiting in my opinion. Last count, it showed a
total of over 50 approved licences, GPL and BSD included.

> Although my CMS of choice is GPL, I find this requirement to be too
> limiting for me to be a member here. My hope was to have more CMSes,
> commercial and non-commercial, open up there source code so that we can
> finally engage in open standards and integration with other systems.

The accepted definition of open source means more then access to
source. It's also a condition to be able to redistribute changes to
the source, just as with free software.

Access to the source is not universal either. You must provide access
to the source if you distribute a binary though.

Some projects are dual licenced, such as MySQL. It's up to the rights
holder to pick a licence to distribute his work.

Note that I haven't mentionned anything about commercial or
non-commercial above. Free software and open source both actually
encourage a free market.

-- 
Robin 'oqp' Millette : http://rym.waglo.com/
Président de FACIL : http://facil.qc.ca/