Free as in Freedom

Free as in Freedom (Part 1)

Overall, this was a good article, but I'd like to make the point of correcting the author on a couple of mistakes:

• ``[...] plunk down roughly $30 for a "distribution" on CD or DVD from companies such as Red Hat, Debian, SuSE and others.'' Debian is not a company and, as far as I can tell, does not sell CDs.


• ``Fortunately, KDE licensed Qt under the GPL [...]'' Qt is owned by Trolltech. It is licensed under the GNU General Public License and the Q Public License only for Linux, Unix and Mac OS X. If I recall correctly, the license for the Windows version is non-free.

I also have some thoughts to add.

I tend to use the term Open Source more often than Free Software, but I use them interchangably. My thoughts lie with the RMS and the FSF in that I love freedom but ESR is right in that Open Source is often an easier term to use when talking to lusers and that it's easier to convert people to `Open Source' (software that is cheap and better than alternatives) than it is to convert them to `Free Software' (software that allows users freedom). Observing the terms from afar they offer the same things but I think they mean different things to the people who use the terms from a phenomenological stand point.