Re: [Gnumed-devel] defn of open-source

[Roberto Mello]

On Fri, Oct 22, 2004 at 11:36:10PM +1000, scaredycat wrote:
> much of the sapdb (maxdb now) open source linux download are 
> configuration scripts in perl and python, but
> there are also these substantial .so files which are linked in, and I 
> think contain the real code that does the work;
> oscar ( which is like a few orders of magnitude less significant and 
> less widely used), has all it's struts actions and
> java code in class files, while the jsp and xml files are source. But 
> they're both still called open source.
> So if Karsten released gnumed as a max--redo.sh script and a lot of 
> .pyc  files, would that still make gnumed open source?
> I'm just trying to be concrete to a woolly abstract answer.

As long as source code is available for download, and the code's license
says that it's free for redistribution and modification, it should be open
source. 

There's quite a bit of confusion out there. Lots of companies want to be
called "open source" even if they are really not. The Open source
initiative tried to trademark the term "Open Source" so that it could
prevent not-really-open-source from being called open source, but failed.

GNUmed is licensed under the GPL, so it's not only open source, it's Free
Software. GPL says that source must accompany binary redistributions, but
binary distributions are obviously just fine.

-Roberto

-- 
Roberto Mello
Software Engineer, Novell Inc.
Friends don't let friends use Windows.