RFC soon on essay "Does Free Software Production in a Bazaarobey the Law of Diminishing Returns?"

Miguel de Icaza miguel at gnu.org
Fri Aug 20 12:00:42 UTC 1999


I agree with Richard that GNOME should be classified of part of the
Free Software movement.  We started this project to provide a free (in
the sense of freedom) user interface for the GNU project.

We are not working on GNOME because it is "economically" a good idea,
nor for any of the allegedly development benefits of open source, but
because of the freedom issues involved in this. 

A problem I have with OpenSource these days is the following: even if
these days Qt passes as OpenSource, it is really annoying for
developers.  All of these "opensource" licenses that have started
appearing are nothing but a big nuisance.

They do not enable me to reuse code between different projects.  The
crazy idea of cut-and-pasting is no longer possible between these
projects. 

There is a nice study of this here:

      http://pmitros.mit.edu/patchwork.html

Best wishes,
Miguel.



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