[Nix-dev] Re: Creating a BIOLOGY section

[Pjotr Prins]

On Wed, Apr 09, 2008 at 02:49:42PM +0200, Ludovic Courtès wrote:
> Again, I can only speak for myself, but that distinction seems
> misleading to me.  It looks like purposefully fuzzy commercial jargon.

Nah. It is about intention. Usually, in academia, people create
software which they are happy to share. But they don't want companies
to run with the idea and commercialize it. This is because the said
companies never paid for the development. As academia is subsidized by
taxpayers this is not such a bad thing. Any company wanting to use the
software have to agree with the author(s).  Most of these software
packages never get to be commercial.

Meanwhile other acadamics (like myself) prefer a really free license -
for the usual obvious reasons.

But I would disagree it is 'commercial jargon'. We have academic
licenses - and have to find a way to tag them as such. If I were to
create a biology distro of packages I would mark the 'channel' or
'closure' as for academic use. Which is different from non-free. I
would put non-free packages in a separate 'channel' - like Debian
does.

But then, I am not the FSF.

Pj.