GnuPG Outlook Express plug-in

[Anthony E. Greene]

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On Tue, 9 Oct 2001, Graham wrote:
>Werner Koch <wk@gnupg.org> wrote thus:
>>BTW, the main reason why I wrote the reply to the announcement was to
>>make clear that GnuPGshell is not free software.  It took some days
>>for me to do so because I first needed to check the license of this
>>program.
>
>Werner, I don't want to pursue this any more, but this is some new
>version of the word "free" I have not yet come across.

That's a limitation of English. In Latin, there are two words: libre and
gratis.

When the FSF says "free" they mean "libre". As implemented by the GPL,
that also implies "gratis".

Windows programmers usually use non-libre tools when creating software, so
they can almost never use a libre license for distribution. So Windows
users generally have no firsthand experience with libre software. Linux
and BSD users use libre software every day. I'd expect that most of us
understood immediately when Werner used the word "free".

I manage Windesktops at work, even though I use Linux as my primary
desktop at work and at home. Often I have to install, re-install, or
upgrade Winboxes and I get so tired of managing licenses and not being
able to truly diagnose problems that I sometimes want to scream. Libre
software has less problems in this area, primarily because it's also
gratis, and because the programmers make it relatively easy to see what's
going on. Providing support costs them time, so they make it easy to
figure out what's wrong. I'm only an novice programmer, but I've had
occasion to go in and fix things or change the default behavior of a
program by editing the code.

The point of all that is that even though Winusers tend to focus on the
gratis nature of Free Software, it's the libre nature that really makes
the difference. It's unfortunate that the FSF is so inflexible about the
terms it uses and that the choices in English are so limited.

Tony
- -- 
Anthony E. Greene <agreene@pobox.com> <http://www.pobox.com/~agreene/>
PGP Key: 0x6C94239D/7B3D BD7D 7D91 1B44 BA26  C484 A42A 60DD 6C94 239D
Chat:  AOL/Yahoo: TonyG05
Linux. The choice of a GNU Generation. <http://www.linux.org/>
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