Talk:FLOSS Concept Booklet

Why do you damn Mandriva?
You state: "You should stay out of Mandriva (formerly Mandrake)" because it "comes with non-free software packages by default"

Mandriva has Free Software edition, which doesn't contain any non-free packages on installation image and even doesn't enable non-free repositories by default. I didn't found this edition less functional or less user friendly than One which isn't completely free (it's only a bit more difficult to install proprietary Nvidia driver)

Also, you could add urpmi to the list of package managers. It has many advanced features: mirrors (as yum), flexible dependency tracking (e.g, you are not obligated to install some vendor chosen icon theme for OpenOffice.org as in Ubuntu, or install MySQL client for Drupal if you want to use it with PostgreSQL)

Konstantin

Translation to German
Hi everybody,

I would like to translate this article to German for de.wikibooks.org. Do you think this makes sense already at this point, or shall I wait until it has become a revised version?

Best regards

Plux

What does "FLOSS" mean ?
What is the target audience of the "FLOSS Concept Booklet" ? What does "FLOSS" in the title mean ?

Is it just a typo -- should be "FOSS (Free/Open Source Software)" ?

If we're never going to use the acronym in the article, maybe we should spell it out in the title also.

--DavidCary 01:20, 13 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Free (Libre) and Open Source Software is the acronym used in the UK public policy on - well, FLOSS.

Adrian Midgley

History section
The way the history has been presented, I guess the questions in the history section can be removed. It is also not possible to see the history separately as Stallman, Linus, GNU... It is all iterconnected.

Vijay

Summarise
This question has gathered a lot of meat. Can somebody summarise it?

Vijay

Rephrasing question and answer
I am moving the following question to the talk page. I am replacing it with a different question and answer.

Hold on a minute. I thought “User” just meant someone who uses a piece of software.

Interesting point. Yes, you are right. Our common understanding of the term “User” does suggest someone who simply ‘uses’ software. One of the most interesting characteristics of Free Software is the way in which this distinction between “user “ and “creator” begins to blur. Creators of Free Software are also its users and, those engaging with Free Software are also often (though not always) involved in the creation of the software. We’ll talk more about this point later.

Vijay

Removing question
This stuff could be adapted and added to the history section.

What does GNU GPL stand for? ***should we have this*** ? GNU is the name of an operating system that is similar to UNIX, an operating system that has been in heavy use among academic and engineering circles since the late 1970s. Since the term UNIX is trademarked, GNU cannot legally call itself UNIX, no matter how similar it might be to it. To remove any threat of violating the trademark and as a tongue-in-cheek remark, GNU actually stands Gnu is Not UNIX. GNU is also the name of an influential foundation that propagates and promotes free software. A huge amount of free software in the world today is licensed under the GPL – the General Public License. This license is a copyleft license that incorporates the terms given in ***sec earlier***

Vijay

Removed a question
The FLOSS booklet is a mini booklet, to be given as a handout. Right? So it is better to keep it short and sweet as posssible. Though the following question does bring a lot of understanding, I feel it is too much involved for a new comer. What do us say guys?

Vijay 04:44, 31 May 2004 (UTC)

End User License Agreements such as the one from Microsoft treat the users of software very differently from the way that users are treated and thought of in Free Software. How do these two differ ?

In general, a large part of the Microsoft EULA concerns itself with limiting your use of the software, and with absolving Microsoft from any responsibilities it may have with respect to the warranty. In contrast, Free Software Licenses spend most of their time specifying the rights allocated users, and the responsibilities for the use of the software from the perspective of software distributors or programmers who incorporate GPL code. Few user-level restrictions are evident.

(adapted from http://voidmain.is-a-geek.net/docs/comparing_the_gpl_to_eula.html )

Broadly, all users of free software are, at the bare minimum considered to be potential creators of free software. The licenses reflect this by making sure that it is extremely easy for someone to transition from being a mere consumer of the software to a co-creator.

Broadly, all users of commercial software are considered to be mere passive consumers of the software. Great pains are taken to ensure that the passive user remains passive, regardless of any possible desire to be more involved with the software. What few rights commercial software licenses grant users are given grudgingly.

Some things I've always thought needed some clarification / (What is free software?)
Item 0 is the main one, the others are kind of tongue-in-cheek but also kind of serious. Users should be able to run the software for any purpose. (freedom 0 — many things in computers start at 0) This really needs clarification in my mind...  most software is purpose-built and paid software practically never restricts the use of something for anything it's actually capable of doing, outside of some insanely expensive computer graphics programs with no open source counterparts that approach their capability (SideFX Houdini) which has a free version where everything functions that one would need to learn the software itself, but the output renders are limited in size and watermarked and commercial use isn't allowed. Since someone actually asked the lead developer of Houdini (the company appears to be almost entirely made up of developers) how someone with no experience with their software would go about learning it and he said he had no idea how to explain it, but being able to produce an amazing reel with it will basically get you hired at any major CGI house that already has perpetual licenses, I'd argue that the free limited version does everything it actually needs to in this case. There's also an "Indie" version limited to companies / individuals with revenue under $100k a year that's the awful model of "rent to never own" but reasonable as far as that model goes. So no, I can't run the free version for the purpose of producing a feature-length 4k masterpiece, but even if they allowed it the render farm required to do so would take up my entire house and cost more money than I've made in my entire life. I could afford the Indie version and remove the resolution limit to get 4k rendering with no watermark, but the same applies. To be more pedantic, "any purpose" is also odd. I can't use the parametric 3D modelling software to format new hard drives (knowing this software it's possible with one of the built-in scripting languages, I haven't tried), but there's no expectation that it should be able to...

Along these lines I could exclude any open source software from "any purpose" that had built-in scripting but enough security blocks that I wouldn't be able to write a virus in it. That's a malicious purpose, but it falls under the scope of "any purpose"... and it's typically blocked from happening ever since everyone got a look at the fallout from Winword.Nuclear and what downsides existed in integrated scripting for extensibility back in the day.

The rest of these are stupidly pedantic because not everyone has my skill set and if they're lucky they never will, but they still apply at some level.

Users should be able to closely examine and study the software and should be able to freely modify and improve it to suit their needs better. (freedom 1)

I've been an assembly programmer since the early 90s and can fluently read disassembly of multiple architectures. Well-written and cleanly compiled C / C++ code's generated assembly is often far easier to read and modify than, oh, I'll just use GAS as an example of things that are far worse than reading assembly deadlistings. Huge messes of spaghetti C code or 20 level deep indented python files are much more painful to me and at some point I'd rather just modify a built version.

If you're reading that and believing me (or at least humoring me), but saying that nobody should be expected to be able to do this or go to the effort, GCC and GAS are used to build practically everything on Linux. Show of hands, how many people can fully read and understand the compiler and backend to the extent that you can be sure your copy of the compiler or source tree isn't injecting malware into everything you build with it? I'll note here that I have no problems reading the linux kernel itself (despite AT&T syntax Intel assembly being an abortion that crawled out of the dumpster and lived and should have been killed off years ago), and I worked for years as a backend / IL level compiler engineer on LLVM / Clang which I could understand without issues. This is only pointing out that having terrible source can be at least as bad as having none, possibly more so because assumptions will be made that anyone has caught an issue with the source because it can be viewed. Heck, I still have commit-without-review privileges on the LLVM tree, and even though multiple large companies have hawk-eyed people getting paid to sit around and look at every checkin for things that might break their products, there are portions of that which so few people understand that I'd bet I could get a vulnerability into the lowering code that would go unnoticed until it became a problem. I wouldn't, because I'm not a jackass, but doing the same with a mess like GCC / GAS would be even easier after building a bit of trust, and harder to spot.

Users should be able to give copies of the software to other people for whom the software will be useful, either gratis or for a fee. (freedom 2)

This needs a "legally" inserted. I'm free to give cracked portable copies of Photoshop to everyone I know or sell it if I want to be an idiot and violate Rule 0 of piracy. It's not legal, but nothing is preventing me or anyone else from doing so, just Adobe attempting to prevent people from doing so and failing. The same applies to any software and protection scheme.

Users should be able to improve the software and freely distribute their improvements to the broader public so that they, as a whole, benefit. (freedom 3)

Again needs a legally, and glosses over the fact that although this applies to something under BSD license or similar, I'm in exactly as much legal quagmire if I want to distribute a modified copy of GCC pared down to a specific subset of functionality, and produced it by direct binary modification from a disassembly. The GPL requires that I give out the source code, but I didn't produce it from the source code; all I could do is dump the assembly of the modified version and list the revision I based it on and I severely doubt that meets GPL requirements. Even if I produced it from source I can't freely distribute my improvements without also distributing a source tree. The public may still benefit from the binary but unless I'm giving up source it's a no-go. I have no idea why I'd want to do that, but I'm not a corporation and maybe I interleaved the source with the full text of Mein Kampf or some equally offensive reading material like the Twilight novels, or just steganographically embedded a feature length movie in the existing comments for safe-keeping at some point, forgot, and made the modifications to that without thinking about it, so the source is not mine to distribute as it now contains material created by the industry that invented and then globally pushed the most draconian copyright schemes in existence... I can't just delete the comments because that would remove the GPL headers, and I can't do some kind of rebase because I did this all for a laugh and have no revision history. These are all incredibly contrived and stupid scenarios but they exist to point out that there's a caveat on "freely" here for some licenses that can't be ignored.

These aren't criticisms of open source software in general, they're just little things that lists like this could avoid leaving out so they read more like statements of fact and less like propaganda without actually hurting the underlying message (and probably helping it, IMO). --A Downfall of Gravity (discuss • contribs) 11:27, 7 October 2021 (UTC)