Re: [seul-edu] SEUL Licensing (was: Our presence at trade shows)

[Roger Dingledine <arma@mit.edu>]

On Wed, Aug 30, 2000 at 08:47:09AM -0700, Ray Olszewski wrote:
> One legitimate answer to this is that "free" is not meant in a financial
> sense, but in the "free speech" sense that FSF uses it to mean. In that

Just to clarify, yes, this is what I meant in all cases. My reasoning
is that libre implies (among other things) gratis. (If we're free to
distribute it, I think seul can do a pretty good job of getting it where
it needs to be.)

> Personally, I think that in our approach to schools, we are too stuck in the
> trap that Linux is free (in a financial sense). It encourages schools to
> want to be on the receiving end of largesse, rather than to commit resources
> to support an OS, and related apps, that are valuable for reasons that go
> beyond their cost. 

This is an excellent excellent point.

Can you elaborate on this, and what we might be able to do about it?
(Perhaps this deserves its own thread...It could be a good piece for
Freshmeat as well, if we want to write it up.)
 
> Even Roger's suggestions run into problems here. If he is right that "if we
> demonstrate that it's useful, then truly free software will spring up to
> replace it," how can we conceivably make a pitch to commercial companies to
> port their software (without concealing our intent)? There's that old
> Marxist line about capitalists selling us the rope with which we will hang
> them, but I doubt that real businesses are quite that gullible (and
> honestely, I hope they are not -- I don't feel good about trying to trick
> businesses into supporting Linux).
 
Well, we do have a pitch: http://www.seul.org/pub/howto/CPAH.html
My cursory re-skimming tells me that Doug sidestepped this issue in
writing his howto.

> All this leads back to my earlier comment that I wish we would be more clear
> about what our goals are. 

Well, there are three sets of goals here: personal goals for each of us,
overall goals for seul, and overall goals for seul/edu.

From a personal perspective, I want to abolish the concept of proprietary
information, patents, etc. I won't go into that here. :)

Wearing my seul project leader hat:
"The end goal of SEUL is to have a comprehensive suite of high-quality
applications (productivity applications as well as leisure/programming
applications) available under the GPL for the Linux platform, as well
as a broader base of educated users around the world who understand why
free software is better."

I will leave formulating the seul/edu goal to, well, the discussion at
hand. Doug?
 
--Roger