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

[Matthew C. Weigel]

On Fri, 20 Aug 1999, Miguel de Icaza wrote:

> I agree with Richard that GNOME should be classified of part of the Free
> Software movement.

I'm glad you said something -- I almost jumped in, but I'm not involved with
Gnome.

> 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. 

I think this is somewhat secondary, if my understanding of Open Source is
correct.  I am much more concerned about the fact that Open Source accepts
an increasing variety of licenses, thus polluting the pool of free software
to include software that allows you to look at it, mess with it, but not
necessarily stick it in the communal library of previous code.

And that loss of community code is a serious problem, and something that
can let proprietary software can sneak its way back in.

> 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

Although that is definitely (IMO) a very significant concern, that article
only addresses licenses that restrict modifications to patches (such as the
QPL, or perhaps an earlier revision of the QPL).  There are more licenses
that allow you to wholesale change things, but still make it difficult to
cut and paste.

 Matthew Weigel                                       Programmer/Sysadmin
  weigel+ at pitt.edu                             Operating Systems Advocate
                         http://www.pitt.edu/~weigel