Ted Leung on the air
Ted Leung on the air: Open Source, Java, Python, and ...
Fri, 21 May 2004
Licensing / Freedom is necessary but not sufficient
Mark is following up from his freedom-0 article. One minor point, since he mentioned my post about community owned tools. What I tried to point out was that freedom (which is accomplished by licensing) is not enough, that you must also have a community. Perhaps it wasn't clear, but I don't think that community without freedom is enough either.

Mark's article is important because it has people talking about freedom, which is great. So now people will go looking for free software, which is also great. But that's the beginning of the journey. Most people want software that a) other people are using and b) someone is enhancing and bug-fixing. Sourceforge is full of GPL'ed software that is dead. It's free, and anyone who wants to can come along and revive it. But until that happens, I'd argue that the freeness of the software is an intangible benefit.

The goal of Mark's piece was to get people thinking about freedom. The goal of my piece was to try to persuade people to become active participants in a public commons (which happened to be blog software).

[17:03] | [computers/open_source] | # | TB | F | G | 0 Comments | Other blogs commenting on this post
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Ted Leung FOAF Explorer

I work at the Open Source Applications Foundation (OSAF).
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