From kragen@dnaco.net Sun Aug 30 17:28:55 1998 Date: Sun, 30 Aug 1998 17:28:53 -0400 (EDT) From: Kragen To: Systalk Subject: Re: [ST] Directory Services on Linux In-Reply-To: Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII X-Keywords: X-UID: 1587 Status: O X-Status: On Sun, 30 Aug 1998, George Bonser wrote: > No, you will not get the source code, just like with any of Netscape's > products, just like with Oracle or any other commercial product. What id > the problem? Just because the OS is open source does not mean all the > applications will be. You do not find source for Applixware, StarOffice or > any other such product. I'll tell you what my problem is. My problem is that you are using the word "commercial" to mean "proprietary". They are two different and distinct things. Red Hat Linux is commercial software; gcc 2 is commercial software; GhostScript is commercial software; Apache is commercial software; X is commercial software. All of them have been developed by for-profit companies (or groups of them) for the purpose of making a profit. By twisting your words this way, you are playing into the hands of propagandists against open-source software, who claim that it's suitable for hobby use, but it's not good enough for commercial use or sale, because only proprietary software can be good enough to be commercial. I have no objection to proprietary applications running on Linux. I have an objection to people using "commercial" to mean "not open-source", because if enough people do this, it will be very difficult for open-source software to get used as other than hobbyist software. Kragen -- Kragen Sitaker We are forming cells within a global brain and we are excited that we might start to think collectively. What becomes of us still hangs crucially on how we think individually. -- Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the Web