Desktop platforms Toolkit

Story: Expunging the myths of open source

• 
• 

I gratefully run Mr. Stallman's software every day, but on the topic of "open source software" he is confused. When a bunch of us met in Palo Alto in 1998 and decided to call it "open source" rather than "free", it was to be inclusive of the BSD license. Under a BSD style license, software is usable by anyone for any purpose, even if they don't share their subsequent improvements with the community. Mr. Stallman's "GPL" is far more restrictive, and the Open Source community is far larger than Mr. Stallman's important corner of it.

At ISC we publish BIND and other software under a BSD style license, and I hope that Mr. Stallman agrees that our work has been helpful in creating and expanding the industry, beneficial to the public, and will be relevant going forward -- in spite of our unwillingness to follow the FSF/GPL ideology.

• 
• 

• 
• 
• 

Full Talkback thread