Re: IRC

[Thomas Schwinge]

On Thu, Mar 10, 2005 at 12:57:48AM +0100, Alfred M. Szmidt wrote:
>    > We don't do open source here.
> 
>    Sure you do. 
> 
> No we don't, we do Free Software.

I am aware of that.

> Free Software and open source are
> different movements; the former cares about freedom, the later does
> not.

I am aware of that, too.

> So please, do not confuse us with what we do not support.

I never intended to do that.

I wrote:
| All the other open source projects I've contributed to, succesfully use
| mailing lists as their primary (and often only) communication-technique.

What I intended to say was: "All the other projects I was able to
contributed to, because they have their source code open, so that one
can get it, dig through it, hack it, contribute to, [...]".
Probably I should have used "source available" instead of "open source"
to avoid certain buzz-words.  I wanted to include all sorts of projects:
Free Software, Open Source and open source (i.e. source available)
software.

Alfred responded:
| We don't do open source here.

(On a side-note: I was not at all talking about the Hurd being Open
Source software; I was merely talking about projects I contributed to.)

Using my above intention of the words "open source", Alfred's statement
is wrong, because one can get the Hurd's source, dig through it, hack
it, contribute to it.  That's what I tried to explain next.

I wrote:
| Sure you do.  The Hurd is not closed source, it's open source.  Just the
| meaning of the words -- there is nothing to interpret into them, [...]

..., but probably too many buzz-words already were used.

I am aware that the Hurd is Free Software, but that doesn't mean I'm
not allowed to say that the Hurd's source code is open, I'd say.


> And this is offtopic...

Indeed.  So let's just stop this thread.


Regards,
 Thomas


P.S. With my above definition (i.e. the plain meaning of the words), Dan
Bernstein's software also is open source, because one can get the
source, dig through it, hack it, contribute to it.