[ Thanks to Tina
Gasperson for this link. ]
“Editor’s note: I contacted RMS and asked him to comment on the
Licensing story we posted yesterday. Last night, I received an
email from him. It is published here, unedited.”
“It is misleading to describe the GNU GPL as ‘open source
licensing’, because it was not developed by the Open Source
Movement. I wrote it as part of the Free Software Movement.”
“The Open Source Movement gets a lot of publicity nowadays, with
the result that people often think they have absorbed or replaced
the Free Software Movement. Media articles labeling our work as
‘open source’ often feed this confusion; every week I get mail from
someone addressing me mistakenly as a fellow ‘open source
developer’. There must be thousands of people who support the Open
Source Movement because they think I do.”
“The open source people have a right to promote their views, but
we would like our work to promote our views. The Open Source
Movement does include the GNU GPL in its list of recommended
licenses, but please describe it as a ‘free software license’, so
that people will not get the wrong idea of where it comes from and
what its purpose is.”