Thursday, February 23, 2006

Free software? You can't just give it away

"In the end, I just had to say that the fact that I am capable of receiving and replying to e-mail addressed to licensing@mozilla.org would have to be sufficient. She would just have to take it on trust that I was not a router-cracking banana merchant. She must have done so, as I never heard from her again.

While the identity verification aspect of this incident is amusing, what is more serious is the set of assumptions her e-mails implied. It demonstrates how the free software model disrupts the old proprietary way of doing things, where copying was theft and you were guilty until proven innocent."

No comments:

Post a Comment