[Freegis-list] free software vs. free services

[Felipe G. Nievinski]

On 12/06/01 at 15:38 Bernhard Reiter wrote:

>On Tue, Jun 12, 2001 at 08:10:26AM -0400, Allan Doyle wrote:
>
(...)
>> By the way, the word free is just so much easier to use than gratis
>> for a native English speaker, I think you're going to fight an
>> unwinnable battle, Bernhard!
>
>Fighting confusion always is unwinnable, but as I scientist by heart
>I have commited to fight this battle all of my life. :)
>More seriously I know that this is a problem. However there is
>no better word for "free software" and this is the main topic of
>this list. If we talk about something else regarding services we
>have to be careful to choose the words for this list or make sure
>that everybody understands. There are several possibilities to
>solve this problem, though. I am open to suggestions.
>
>	Bernhard
>
It's worth keepping an eye on the next generation of the GNU General Public License (v3). Timothy Ney, from FSF, said in a speech given 15 days ago they are studying how to cover the Application Service Providers (ASP) in GPL 3.
It seems logical to cover the software of ASP, but IMHO it just makes no sense to extend it to the service itself (or, "what a free (as in freedom) service would be?")

my R$0.02
Felipe.