Re: Woctave-another gui front end

[Stephen Montgomery-Smith]

On 12/20/2012 12:20 PM, Sergei Steshenko wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> 
> ----- Original Message -----
>> From: Stephen Montgomery-Smith <address@hidden>
>> To: address@hidden
>> Cc: 
>> Sent: Thursday, December 20, 2012 8:09 PM
>> Subject: Re: Woctave-another gui front end
>>
> [snip]
>> And by the way, what is this difference between "open source" and 
>> "free"?  
> [snip]
>> Stephen
>>
> 
> 
> Restriction/strings attached.
> 
> There is free as in beer, and free as in speech, and both.
> 
> GPL is the least free for users and the most protective for developers, by 
> the way.
> 
> Regards,
>   Sergei.

But when I have written what I consider to be open-source software, I
almost always release it under a BSD license.  So by your collective
definitions would it be accurate to say that all this time I have been
writing free software instead of open-source?

To put it another way - instead of correcting people who say
"open-source" by saying "no, its not open-source, rather it is free"
wouldn't it be better to say "yes, it is open-source, but more than
that, it is also free"?

Or are their parts of octave that are genuinely free but not open-source
(that is, binaries are available for free download with no strings
attached, but the source is not available)?

Or maybe the BSD license is also considered too restrictive?

By the way, I do greatly prefer a BSD license rather than GPL.  I do
agree with people who say GPL is overly restrictive.  On the other hand,
if other people want to release their software under GPL, I don't feel I
have a right to stop them.

Stephen