[Ale-study] Testing testing... this thing on?

[Scott M. Jones]

The word "free" means two different things in the open source sense.  It
means freedom or liberty, but can also mean price of $0.00.

"Free as in speech" refers to freedom or liberty.

"Free as in beer" refers to price of $0.00 for the actual product
(regardless of recipe).

The open source community is often complaining about too much emphasis
on price of $0.00 and not enough emphasis on freedom or liberty.  Having
source code available for the entire operating system, and a
modification-friendly license, means that you can customize anything any
way that you want to, and this is really the power of open source,
regardless of what you paid or didn't pay for it.

Linux is licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL) which comes
from the "Free Software Foundation", and the name "Free" in this
foundation definitely refers to freedom and/or liberty rather than price
of the product.  Look up the history of Richard Stallman for more
information on this topic.  (Also the term "copyleft" is sometimes used
ironically to indicate that the GPL doesn't technically provide 100%
freedom, not as much as public domain licensing would.)

Hope this helps.

-Scott

P.S. It appears JD is referring to the document 101-LPIC-1-admin-en.pdf
which can be downloaded via this command in your local copy of Linux
that you should now have running for class:

wget -rnd http://lpi.jdpfu.com/

The getent command appears on page 32 of this document.  So you should
read up through page 32.


On 1/26/17 9:09 AM, H P Ladds wrote:
> Thanks, things have been silent here, and I wasn't sure that I was
> signed-up correctly. So I "pinged" the list?
> 
> I'm uncertain of what I should be studying right now? I'm reading the
> "Introduction to Linux
> for Users and Administrators." Anyone know what will we cover in the
> next class?  
> 
> Also, I don't understand the saying that OS software is "Free as in
> speech, not as in beer." Is beer free in Helsinki? Isn't open source
> software and brewing beer more analogous than free speech? Beer is
> brewed: It has a recipe, a brewing process and a finished product.
> Similarly, software is compiled: It has code, a compiling process, and a
> finished binary. 
> 
> What you do with that the recipe and the beer is up to your discretion.
> You can give the beer away or charge for it. You can give the recipe
> away or charge for it. People can change and alter your recipe... Etc.
> So too with code and software.   
> 
> Freedom of speech is an altogether different topic.
> 
> Cheers,
> Preston