On Wed, Nov 5, 2008 at 09:09, Luke Dashjr luke@dashjr.org wrote:
On Tuesday 04 November 2008 07:52:36 pm Billy Crook wrote:
One quite refreshing thing about Free Software is that most of it uses only a small handful of licenses.
If only it was that small... On my desktop machine, my approved licenses list is not at all short:
Actually Luke, I meant to mention that benefit of Gentoo. As you've just demonstrated, it's package manager, emerge, makes license type easily sortable and available information when choosing what to install. You've even been able to block nonfree licenses. My point though, was that multiple programs share, and reuse licenses in GNU+Linux, as where they do not in Windows. Even the MS EULA is not just one document. It's a seperate document for every product.
And in the Proprietary world, you also usually have to buy one license to install server software (sometimes one per core!) and another license for every instance of a user using that software. Even if you took the money out of it, having separate licenses for running, and making use of software is just arcane!