[Freegis-list] MapServer license

[Jan-Oliver Wagner]

Hi Eduardo,

On Thu, Mar 04, 2004 at 08:54:49AM -0300, Eduardo Patto Kanegae wrote:
> What kind of software UMN MapServer is? Is it a Free Software
> or an OpenSource?

UMN MapServer is Free Software licenced with a MITish license.

The term Open Source has a definition which is equal to
the one of Free Software.
I prefer the term Free Software:
http://www.fsfeurope.org/documents/whyfs.en.html

> what is the main difference of OpenSource against FreeSoft? OpenSource
> means that you can get the code but the goals and future of software can
> only be decided by a restrict group?

besides the issues explained in the link above, differences are
actually only expressed through the licenses. There
are many Free Software licenses out there, GNU GPL, GNU LGPL and
MIT/X11/BSDish are the most common ones.

For a Free Software there never can be a monopoly to decide
the future. If one gets unhappy with the decisions of a core team
she can always launch a forked development. This happend only a
couple of times in the past and usually led to a re-joined
development.

Best

	Jan

-- 
Jan-Oliver Wagner               http://intevation.de/~jan/

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