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Comment by oleganza | Hacker News Reader

I agree with your sentiment, but want to provide a slight correction about "Free Software": MIT/BSD licensed software while not free in FSF/GPL sense, is still open and widely used and solves the problem we have right now. To avoid confusion with FSF ideals, I'd talk simply about Open Source software.

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Sorry to nitpick but MIT/BSD licensed software is free in the FSF/GPL sense. To be free software, you have to respect freedoms 0-3 as defined here: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html . This is the case for MIT/BSD licensed software and both those licenses are considered acceptable free software licenses by the FSF.

The cheklist for Open Source software can be found here: http://opensource.org/docs/osd. They are slightly different but in practice, most (if not all) free software licenses are also open source licenses and vice versa.

Stallman's definition of 'free software' isn't authoritative, lots of people have other definitions, and Stallman is quite explicit on trying to change definitions to suit him.

Thanks for clarification. I thought that since MIT/BSD does not enforce source disclosure, users don't have the "freedom to change the software" according to GPL parlance.

I think you might be a bit confused.

MIT/BSD are fully supported by the FSF and are GPL compliant. They are free software licenses in all aspects.

> MIT/BSD are fully supported by the FSF and are GPL compliant. They are free software licenses in all aspects.

To be clear, GPL compliance is not a prerequisite to being a free software license. There exist many free software licenses which are not technically GPL compliant for various reasons: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#GPLIncompatibl...

However, while freedom does not imply GPL compliance, I do believe GPL compliance implies freedom. I'm not 100% certain of this, but I can't think of a counterexample or how that might not be true.

(I know you probably know this, but I want to make sure others reading your comment do too).

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