Re: [Accessibility] Call to Arms

[Willem van der Walt]

On Thu, 29 Jul 2010, Richard Stallman wrote:

>     The two most usable OCR engines that is free of cost, open-source and
> 
> You mean cuneiform and tesseract-ocr, I think.  Are these programs
> free software?  You cited the definition of free software correctly.
> As a factual question, do these two programs fit it?
They do fit it to some extent.
Tesseract-ocr is released under the apache version 2 license.
Cuneiform does not state a specific license, but it is more BSD-like.  One 
may basically do with it what you like as long as you keep the copyright 
in tact.
As I read the license, one would be allowed to make modifications and sell 
a binary-only copy if you like.

 > 
> Whether they are open source is not quite the same question.
> Most open source programs are free software, but there are exceptions
> because the two criteria are not the same.
> 
> Whether they are available free of charge is simply beside the point.
> Adobe Flash Player is available free of charge, but it is proprietary
> and has malicious features.
> 
>     run under Linux/UNIX
> 
> When you say "Linux", I would guess you mean the GNU/Linux system.
> Linux alone is not sufficient to run applications -- it is just a
> kernel, and you need more than that.  Is that right?

Yes.
> 
> See http://www.gnu.org/gnu/gnu-linux-faq.html for more explanation.
> 
>                    is not released under the GNU GPL license,
> 
> The GNU GPL is one among several free software licenses.  Programs
> which are not released under the GNU GPL may nonetheless be free.  If
> a program is released under a free software license which is not the
> GNU GPL, it is still ethical, so we may as well use it when it's
> useful.
> 
Yes, but what I was trying to say is that if two programs exist with about 
the same functionallity and the one is released under theGNU-GPL and the 
other one under a license that permit distribution of binary-only copies, 
I would rather use the one released under the GPL. > See 
gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html 
for a list of many known > free software licenses.
> 

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