Re: Announcing GNOME's official GitHub mirror

[Richard Stallman <rms gnu org>]

        [ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider
        [ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,
        [ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example.

    We're aware of the distinction between open source software and free/libre
    software. GitHub, the organization in question, is associated with the open
    source community

The issue is where we stand, not where they stand.  Someone wrote,

    GitHub has released more
    >     open source code and tools than the gitorious community.

GNOME is part of the free software movement, so we should say "free
software", not "open source".  If we judge organizations by the
software development, we should judge by what free software they release,
not what "open source" software they release.

The developers of GitHub are free to think and say whatever they wish,
but GNOME should not take them as a guide.

                     and all its libraries are licensed under the non-copyleft
    2-clause BSD license.

That's a non-sequitur; it has nothing to do with the issue at hand.

I've encountered many people who believe that lax permissive licenses
are "open source" and that 'free software" refers to copyleft licenses
only.  However, neither of those is true.

In fact, the lax permissive licenses are free and the GPL is free.
See http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html.
And both of them are open source, too.

Thus, the choice of license, between permissive license and copyleft,
is orthogonal to the philosophical choice of values, between free
software and open source.

See http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.html
for explanation of these points and many others.

There are some licenses which are open source but not free.
They are _too restrictive_ to be free.

-- 
Dr Richard Stallman
President, Free Software Foundation
51 Franklin St
Boston MA 02110
USA
www.fsf.org  www.gnu.org
Skype: No way! That's nonfree (freedom-denying) software.
  Use Ekiga or an ordinary phone call.