Re: future of quail

Hauke Fath writes: No, even with context your phrasing was ambiguous. I merely chose the interpretation that is consonant with my understanding of the facts. Not in my experience, although the experience is perhaps biased. It was gained in fora where BSDers' sense of "freedom" collides with that of FSFers, such as Russ Nelson's Free Software Business list. It was *very* common in those fora for BSDers to talk about the unfreedom of copyleft and the unfairness of the way GNU sucks in permissively licensed software and returns nothing to the wider community including non-GPL projects. Stallman's penchant for demanding that "GNU" be prefixed to every use of the word "Linux" not followed by "kernel", while failing to mention the contributions to the GNU System by Larry Wall, Don Knuth, MIT/X Consortium, Aladdin Enterprises, and of course the BSD developers was another big irritant. On the contrary, I have never heard a BSDer say "If you would just tell your damn camp followers to preserve copyright notices when they copy our stuff into GPL projects, there'd be no problem." Surely that would be a lie! And worry about copyright notices certainly doesn't account for the EAY copyleft clause in OpenSSL. I'm sorry, but I really don't think the annoyance being discussed here is imaginary, nor is it about stripped copyright notices. True, *some*, perhaps the majority of BSDers only care about the notices. But there is always that vocal minority.... And I have definitely seen FSFers (who as far as I know never have stripped copyright notices) under the kinds of attack that David describes and (incorrectly) attributed to Julian. Note: I have normally espoused the BSD position on freedom (essentially, "you can't force people to be free, but you can give them permission, the more permission, the better") in such discussions. However, I don't think it's good for advocates of that position to gloss over the fact that there's a real philosophical difference that (at least some of us) really care about, as much as the FSF camp does about their position. And that being human, sometimes we trash-talk our opponents. _______________________________________________ XEmacs-Beta mailing list XEmacs-Beta(a)xemacs.org http://lists.xemacs.org/mailman/listinfo/xemacs-beta