Hi,
On 4/16/06, Philip Tellis philip.tellis@gmx.net wrote:
Sometime on Apr 15, nipra assembled some asciibets to say:
<snip>
Proprietory software means owned by someone with owner exercising control over it by means of putting up restrictions on use, redistribution or modification of software and thus eventually making it non-free.
So are you saying that the GPL enforces no restrictions on the use, redistribution and modification of the software? Let me go over this.
(1) Definitely not. What I'm trying to say is, owners of proprietary software exercise control and put up restrictions by means of copyright in such a way that it takes away the freedom of users.
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/categories.html#ProprietarySoftware
Free Software license puts up restrictions by means of copyright to ensure users' freedom.
(2) To differentiate between what copyright is doing to make a proprietary software non-free and what copyright is doing to guarantee your freedom in case of Free Software, the term "copyleft" is used in stead of "copyright" for Free Software.
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/licenses.html#WhatIsCopyleft
(3) From wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proprietary_software
"Proprietary software is software that has restrictions on using and copying it, usually enforced by a proprietor. The prevention of use, copying, or modification can be achieved by legal or technical means. Technical means include releasing machine-readable binaries only, and withholding the human-readable source code.Legal means can involve software licensing, copyright and patent law. Proprietary software can be sold for money as commercial software or available at zero-price as freeware."
"The term is used by the Free Software Foundation to describe software that is not free software or semi-free software."
Regards Nikhil Prabhakar