How did he 'write the rules' in 1997 when GNU & FSF long predated this?
They're the rules for the Open Source Initiative and the Debian Project to approve licensing.
Richard wrote a statement of the Four Freedoms in an early edition of the GNUs Bulletin, which was mostly distributed in paper form on the MIT campus and environs. He did not further promote them until a long time later. So, when I had to write license guidelines for Debian, the Four Freedoms document was unknown. I sent my document to Richard, and he wrote back that he felt it was a good definition of Free Software. Surprisingly, he did not mention his Four Freedoms document in that correspondence.
Much later, FSF published its statement of the Four Freedoms on its web site as an alternative to the Open Source Definition.
1997 ? (Score:1)
How did he 'write the rules' in 1997 when GNU & FSF long predated this?
Re:1997 ? (Score:4, Interesting)
They're the rules for the Open Source Initiative and the Debian Project to approve licensing.
Richard wrote a statement of the Four Freedoms in an early edition of the GNUs Bulletin, which was mostly distributed in paper form on the MIT campus and environs. He did not further promote them until a long time later. So, when I had to write license guidelines for Debian, the Four Freedoms document was unknown. I sent my document to Richard, and he wrote back that he felt it was a good definition of Free Software. Surprisingly, he did not mention his Four Freedoms document in that correspondence.
Much later, FSF published its statement of the Four Freedoms on its web site as an alternative to the Open Source Definition.
Bruce