[UFO Chicago] free operating systems [was: Solaris 10?]

[Nate Riffe]

Carey Tyler Schug said this (probably recently):
> Does free in UFO refer to licensing costs or does it really mean "the 
> source is publicly available"?

Free as in speech.

> Are RHEL and other "pay for it only" versions of Linux disqualified?

Certain parts of some non-gratis distributions are not freely
licensed.  The "freeness" of the distribution depends on whether those
parts are adjunct or integral to the distribution at large.  In
general, they are adjunct, and so the distribution is still a free
operating system.  The one exception I can think of is Caldera
OpenLinux, which had a few proprietary libraries at very low levels of
the system.  I think we all know what those folks are up to these
days, and it's probably safe to generalize that this type of chimeric
distribution isn't worth toying with in the first place.

> Is Solaris 10 (with or without source) included because one can get a 
> free educational/developers license?  There are other OSes like this, or 
> used to be.

Solaris 10 as available under Sun's open source license (I forget what
they decided to call it) is free for purposes of qualifying for UFO.
The reality though, is that the Sun open source license is just
another isolated camp is the space of all freely-licensed copyrights.
The Sun license isolates the Solaris 10 code from being comingled with
GPL code and vice versa, because both of these licenses have an
exclusivity clause governing the licensing of derived works.  The same
is true with Mozilla/GPL, Mozilla/Sun, and other pairs of licenses.
The result is that the space of freely-licensed copyrights is
partitioned into these licensing camps.  Each camp is totally free to
share with itself, and the actual copyright holder of any given piece
of code could dual- or treble-license their chunk of it so that it's
in more than one camp.  However, separate camps are by and large
verboten from sharing, despite the fact that they may each be
independently free.  There is, of course, a large body of code
licensed under MIT- and BSD-style licenses which do not have an
exclusivity clause.  This code can be comingled with code from any of
the freely-licensed camps, but the result stays in that camp.

In conclusion, every time someone uses a new license with exactly the
same terms as the GPL, but which is not itself the GPL.... God kills a
kitten.

> Is VM/370 (mainframe) included because IBM has said they will not pursue 
> anybody that uses it without a license, and when licenses were 
> available, the license was free, and it comes with full source?

No.  OSI could never approve that license, and the good graces of IBM
do not make that irrelevant.

-Nate

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