[haiku] Re: How free is Haiku?

  • From: PulkoMandy <pulkomandy@xxxxxxxxx>
  • To: haiku@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Mon, 26 Oct 2009 10:14:38 +0100

Le Mon, 26 Oct 2009 08:53:28 +0100, Chris Andrew <cjhandrew@xxxxxxxxx> a écrit:


Hi, all.

I'm new to the list, so 'Hello!' to all.

My background is GNU/Linux, as a past sys admin and user for about 10 years.
I'm intrigued by Haiku, but was wondering how 'open source' it is.

It seems that much of the software is released under an MIT type licence,
but I was wondering, as a whole, does the project aim to comply with the '4
software freedoms'?

www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html

Can anyone clarify?

Cheers,

Chris.

Yes. The MIT licence is enough to comply with these freedoms.
The licence was chosen back in 2001 when it looked like someone could still take over BeOS in a commercial way and benefit code from the Haiku project, without being trapped by the GPL enforcing them to also release their sources.

So basically you can do whatever you want, just take care of removing the Haiku logo and name if you make your own distribution. This logo is a trademark and you are not allowed to use it unless there is a very good reason. Mozilla does the same with the Firefox name&logo, for example.

So, the spirit is not exactly the same as Linux one, but the results are the same : do whatever you want with the sourcecode as long as you keep the copyright notice in the sourcecode.

You can read the licence text, it's only 3 paragraph long and very clear, not like the GPL one ...

--
Adrien Destugues / PulkoMandy
http://pulkomandy.ath.cx

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