FSF Opens Nominations For Free Software Awards 2012 56
jrepin writes "The Free Software Foundation (FSF) and the GNU Project today announced the opening of nominations for the 15th annual Free Software Awards. The Free Software Awards include the Award for the Advancement of Free Software and the Award for Projects of Social Benefit. The Award for the Advancement of Free Software is presented annually to an individual who has made a great contribution to the progress and development of free software, through activities that accord with the spirit of free software. The Award for Projects of Social Benefit is presented to the project or team responsible for applying free software, or the ideas of the free software movement, in a project that intentionally and significantly benefits society in other aspects of life."
Re:Not very free (Score:5, Interesting)
Not sure if it's worth replying, because I doubt I'll convince you. But I shall try.
The GPL gives you Freedom 0, to run the software as you wish. In fact, the GPL states in section 9:
Freedom 1: freedom to read understand the source code. Again, there are no restrictions on this, AFAIK.
Freedom 2: freedom to modify the software. No restrictions on this, AFAIK (as long as you don't distribute).
Freedom 3: freedom to distribute and create derivative works. There are some restrictions on how you do this. For example, you must clearly state the license and derivative works must be licensed under the GPL.
If you like permissive licensing, I won't blame you. There are a lot of free software licenses that are free software licenses as well. But a lot of them have restrictions as well, e.g. acknowledgement in sources. Only software in the public domain has no restrictions, and provides "true" freedom according to your definition.
Going back to the subject, you might be interested to know that NetBSD cofounder and OpenBSD project leader Theo de Raadt was awarded the Advancement For Free Software in 2004. The advancement of free software has nothing to do with the GPL.