Re: The future of your Nokia Windows phone
 

Haha. I think that abill_uk 'dun got himself owned by daperl.

Re: The future of your Nokia Windows phone
 

LMAO! Poor abill_uk.

Re: The future of your Nokia Windows phone
 

Hahaha, oh my god. On the ropes.

I must say that even though abill_uk is one of my UK brethren and I should at least try to defend him, he does seem like a gibbering, over opinionated but short on facts, foaming at the mouth nutcase.

Re: The future of your Nokia Windows phone
 

Well yes, they have restricted the licenses that don't fit the app store model and haven't excluded their own just because it's their license. So they haven't been hypocritical.

There are plenty, and they are some of the most popular OSS licenses, they are also the most 'free' licenses used by the most altruistic coders. In fact almost the entire android userland uses one such license.

The flipside of that is that the benefit isn't there for the majority of people. Freedom is great but it seems that there still is no consumer-level free platform that can match the user experience provided by the less free commercial solutions and it seems the vast majority of people prefer that and restrict themselves to everything that isn't a restrictive OSS license because the benefit simply isn't there (at least for them).

Probably, FOSS is about more than restrictive OSS licenses, it includes even the very permissive ones that place almost no restrictions on the user at all.

Re: The future of your Nokia Windows phone
 

Arguably Android gets close as possible without being as Free, nor as open, as most Linux distros (never mind their NIH syndrome.) But this isn't the software's fault. Suppose, for instance, if Google had gone with more standard *nix style base instead of the formerly proprietary blob that is Android?

"Restrictive" and "OSS" do not belong in the same sentence. Anyone who tells you they do, doesn't understand them.

Re: The future of your Nokia Windows phone
 

In other words, there's no such thing as a free lunch. What you are talking about is called value. The most fundamental of all factors in commerce. We are willing to pay large sums if what we get is valuable to us. For instance the N900, it wasn't exactly cheap, and most people would never buy one because they feel it is worthless. But to a few geeks it is priceless :)

Re: The future of your Nokia Windows phone
 

Well then why is the GPL considered an OSS license then? Can you use GPL code in any way that you want? No, it places *restrictions* on how you can use that code.

EDIT: And just so you don't try to dance around the definition of 'restrictive' and to provide proof that you're wrong, have a look here, where the Open Source Initiative themselves refer to the GPLv2 as 'restrictive'.

http://ideas.opensource.org/wiki/help/license

Re: The future of your Nokia Windows phone
 

No, it doesn't. It places restrictions on the redistribution of that code. At which point it's not you that is using it, but someone else. You can use the code anyway you'd like, internally, but you can't distribute it (which is what Copyright defines.)

The GPL is not about you, but about whomever you give it to.

Re: The future of your Nokia Windows phone
 

That's the same thing. The redistribution restrictions are part of the license, therefore the license is restrictive, just as the OSI quite clearly says. How are you not understanding that?

So i can't use it any way i like, i can ONLY use it any way i like internally, because the license restricts it in that way.

And see my above edit regarding the OSI referring to the GPLv2 as restrictive.

Re: The future of your Nokia Windows phone
 

I see that we're heading into a discussion on the merits of the GPL (in all its various flavors). The truth is, the GPL came about mainly as a reaction to the gradual corporatizaton of software in the universities. Bit by bit, code bases that had been passed relatively freely between students and teachers became encumbered with a variety of restrictive licensing agreements. Even code that started out completely free for anyone's use would, if the people maintaining it became part of a private organization, inevitably be relicensed as a product of that organization.

Thus, folks like Richard Stallman began to try and find ways to avoid the slow strangulation of the world of "open" source code (which, for at least a little while, really did look like it might be made obsolete). This is how the GPL was born. The GPL is a licensing agreement that states that the source code must be open, but far more importantly, adds the restriction that any further modifications to the code must also fall under the GPL. This, of course, is a rather draconian restriction!

However, the GPL has also proven to be the only truly successful open source license. Sure, there are major code bases out there under other open licenses (MIT, BSD, etc.), but most of them have major corporate backing to keep the code going; if the companies involved back out (or change their mind about licensing), the previously open codebase can become closed very quickly. Only the massively restrictive GPL can give the independent coder the assurance that what he writes isn't going to disappear inside some corporate project to which he has no access; if your code is under the GPL, then everything that anybody else does with it will also be under the GPL, forever.

So no, open is not the same as free. The surprising truth, in fact, is that free software becomes closed software very quickly...