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NewsForge: Perens a Little More Proprietary-Friendly with Sincere Choice

“Bruce Perens, one of the original board members of Software in
the Public Interest (SPI) Inc. has asked that organization to
consider taking ownership of another project he started, the
Sincere Choice initiative. But while SPI considers itself part of
the Free Software community, Sincere Choice says it believes that
‘there should be a fair, competitive market for computer software,
both proprietary and Open Source.’

“According to the minutes of the most recent SPI board meeting,
at least one member of the board raised concerns about adopting an
initiative friendly to ‘closed source.’ Closed source, or
proprietary software, keeps its source code a secret, a notion
antithetical to the idea of Free Software and Open Source
advocates.

“‘Ian [Jackson] had a problem with the statement ‘We support a
broad range of copyright policies, from Public Domain through Open
Source and Free Software to Proprietary’ [as written at the Sincere
Choice website]: SPI does not support that range but is a Free
Software organisation,” wrote board member Martin Schulze in the
minutes…”

Complete
Story

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