fun w/ rms

[der.hans]

Am 24. Apr, 2001 schwäzte Craig White so:

> it's not often someone's gonna rag about feature glut on open source

There are, however, few things that have as many features as emacs
:). There are, I believe, several emacs clones or parred down versions of
emacs available, so once I've made it through my concert pianist training
I can give those a try :).

> stuff - or is emacs freeware? I consider this a good thing. I did

Freeware is something else entirely. Bad term to use for legal reasons,
I'm told.

Free Software and Open Source are the terms. The nitpicking is generally
between those two terms.

> break down and buy the O'Reilly pocket guide to Emacs though to figure
> out what to do with it.

I use mine to keep uneven tables stable :). Actually, I think O'Reilly has
published some really nice pocket guides.

> On another vein, and I am gonna really display my ignorance here...I
> am reading thru this thread and it all escapes me. How much does it
> matter to me that something is FreeBSD, GPL license or freeware? Is it
> just because it is more important to Debian users than RedHat users
> since it doesn't get included in the distro?

The *BSD license[0] allows the code to be used for anything, including to
be snaked into proprietary software. One might have to include copyright
material after that. Apple could close the source to OS X and diverge as
far as they want.

GPL[1] says the source code has to remain available. It also works to
guarantee some freedoms[2] for those who use it, e.g. the author can't
yank it back meaning that once you get it, it's yours. It doesn't allow
linking to it if the software linking isn't free enough. The Lesser
General Public License ( LGPL[3] ), does allow linking.

Open Source[4] also says the source code has to remain available. It,
however, doesn't put the emphasis on the 'freedoms'.

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/license-list.html has a lite review of
different licenses from the gnu perspective.

rms will probably curse us, but the terms of Open Source encompass those
of Free Software making Open Source a superset over Free Software. Or so
it seems to me.

I am not an expert in this stuff, so everything above could be completely
wrong...

> Lastly, is anyone familiar with a GUI editor for HTML for Xwindows or
> PHP plug-ins for the SDK of Adobe GoLive? Forgive me for using Adobe.

Ah, now we have something I know nothing about :).

Erit Thelin from our illustrious group, who is also the instigator of
AZPHP, has authored a php mode for JED, which I believe has an emacs
mode. Someone else now maintains it, but certainly Eric can point you at
that person :).

ciao,

der.hans

PS Funny that the particular quote in my sig this time came up for this
email :).

[0] http://www.xfree86.org/3.3.6/COPYRIGHT2.html#6
[1] http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html
[2] http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
[3] http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/lesser.html
[4] http://www.OpenSource.org/docs/definition.html

-- 
# der.hans@LuftHans.com home.pages.de/~lufthans/ www.YourCompanyHere.net ;-)
# ... make it clear I support "Free Software" and not "Open Source",
# and don't imply I agree that there is such a thing as a
# "Linux operating system". - rms