[Aldor-l] Aldor is or is not free?

[Bill Page]

On 20 Dec 2007 19:53:33 +0100, Martin Rubey wrote:
> Timo Jyrinki <timo.jyrinki at hut.fi> writes:
>
> > Meanwhile, the front page could be also corrected to reflect the
> > fact that Aldor is not yet Free, only made more accessible to
> > some people.
>
> I updated the FrontPage.  Thanks for noticing.

Thank you, Martin for your edit of the FrontPage on

  http://axiom-wiki.newsynthesis.org

I think your reference to "semi-free" is great. It is very good to
have an "authoritative" reference to the terminology. :-)

> I also hope that one day, aldor will become truly free software, but
> I guess, the copyright holders (among them NAG and Stephen Watt)
> are not yet convinced that it would serve them better.

The issue of course is not purely a semantic one, but I think what you
really mean is that you hope that one day aldor will be licensed in a
manner that is at least compatible with GPL. Right? It is not my
intention to speak for Stephen, but it is my understanding that whole
issue of licensing was discussed rather thoroughly with NAG and
specifically the terms of the GPL. It seems that there is a rather
deep disagreement with the choice of GPL as the best means to promote
open software development. It seems unlikely to me that this
philosophical disagreement can be resolved in a rational manner.

In spite of it's wide adoption certainly there are many other people
who have questioned and continue to question the reasonableness of GPL
and the approach taken by the Free Software Foundation. It was
probably for that reason that Axiom was licenses as modified BSD and
not GPL when it was released as open source. (BSD is compatible with
GPL.) Unfortunately NAG did not agree to the use of BSD this time for
Aldor, but perhaps there is some hope for this in the future *if* we
can somehow argue that the "no commerical use" clause somehow harms
the future development of Aldor.

Personally I don't understand the issue over the "royalty free" clause
since it seems to me that this is implicit in both GPL and BSD -
unless I grossly misunderstand the intent.

>
> Still, it must be said the the current state is a *huge* improvement to
> what it was before.  It seems that now some people are actually actively
> improving the compiler.
>

Yes! :-) This is an excellent and much anticipated result of making
the source code of Aldor  more widely available. I think we need to do
everything possible to encourage this and make possible a
collaborative environment where these improvements will be shared.

Regards,
Bill Page.