What is free software? [Re: Licenses and Open Source don't conflict.]

[Gerhard =?unknown-8bit?Q?H=E4ring?=]

* Chris Gonnerman <chris.gonnerman at newcenturycomputers.net> [2002-04-13 00:15 -0500]:
> Another reason often given (by the misinformed) is that GPL code can
> somehow "infect" non-GPL free code (BSD let's say); it goes something
> like this: Bob writes an excellent library and releases it under the
> BSD license.  George has his previously mentioned GPL'd library, which
> is also most cool.  Fred comes along, and writes a program which uses
> both Bob's and George's libraries, and for some reason Fred actually
> incorporates the library source in his project rather than expecting
> you to separately install it.  Fred must release his program under the
> GPL (he has no choice in this matter).

This is wrong. Fed must release his program under a Free Software
license (see the FSF page I mentioned in a previous posting for a
listing of those). So Fred can release his program under a
BSD/Python-like license, too.

Gerhard
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