From owner-freebsd-advocacy Tue Jan 9 3:53:42 2001 Delivered-To: freebsd-advocacy@freebsd.org Received: from gwdu60.gwdg.de (gwdu60.gwdg.de [134.76.98.60]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 95D6B37B401 for ; Tue, 9 Jan 2001 03:53:24 -0800 (PST) Received: from localhost (kheuer@localhost) by gwdu60.gwdg.de (8.11.1/8.9.3) with ESMTP id f09BrFs99442; Tue, 9 Jan 2001 12:53:16 +0100 (CET) (envelope-from kheuer@gwdu60.gwdg.de) Date: Tue, 9 Jan 2001 12:53:15 +0100 (CET) From: Konrad Heuer To: Dan Langille Cc: Subject: Re: any Linux distros which are not Open Source? In-Reply-To: <200101091131.AAA24507@ducky.nz.freebsd.org> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=X-UNKNOWN Content-Transfer-Encoding: QUOTED-PRINTABLE Sender: owner-freebsd-advocacy@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG On Wed, 10 Jan 2001, Dan Langille wrote: > I'm involved in a thread on nz.comp and someone made this statement: > > "There are commercial forms of Linux that are not open source." > > That's a conflict of terms isn't it? Doesn't the GPL require that it be > open source? The Linux kernel is under GPL and thus open source, I agree. On the other hand Linux - in strict sense - is nothing more than the kernel. Thus one can build a Linux distribution containing the kernel and a lot of additional open source tools (like the GNU tools) which will be open source completely. But I can imagine a Linux distribution where anything except the kernel isn't open source. For example, as far as I know, you won't be able the get source code of yast or yast2, the SuSE Linux administration tool. And what's about Corel Linux? Will they put all their special work to open source? I don' believe so. What I know is that Debian Linux is the only one which is open source completely. Regards Konrad Heuer Personal Bookmarks: Gesellschaft f=FCr wissenschaftliche Datenverarbeitung mbH G=D6ttingen http://www.freebsd.org Am Fa=DFberg, D-37077 G=D6ttingen http://www.daemonnews.o= rg Deutschland (Germany) kheuer@gwdu60.gwdg.de To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-advocacy" in the body of the message