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Technology Stocks : LINUX -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: E. Charters who wrote (677)	12/2/1998 1:10:00 PM
From: Mitch Blevins	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 2615

There are an endless variety of software licenses, and it's hard to draw a line as to which ones are 'Open Source' and which aren't. The most popular open source licenses are the GPL, Artistic, or BSD licenses. The two most accepted definitions of which software is free are the Open Source Definition (http://www.open-source.org) and the Debian Free Software Guidelines (http://debian.org/social_contract#guidelines). Both are documents descendents from Software in the Public Interest (http://www.spi-inc.org). Sendmail satisfies the conditions of both of these definitions. Nothing in the license prevents anybody from modifying and redistributing it as long as they also make the source available. Just because one group of people may be the only people _actually_ working on a piece of software does not mean it is not open source. That is dictated by what is _allowed_ by the license. One could argue that only one group of people modify Gnome (which is GPL) but that doesn't make it closed source. -Mitch