I think that much of this debate comes from a confusion about
the meaning of the term "free". When we talk about Eprints software
being free, the term "free" should take the meaning as implied
by the GNU public license. In this particular meaning, one
should think of it as "freedom", rather then "zero euro". More
precisely, Richard Stallman, who is the main father figure
of the free software movement, will tell you that free
software is any software that has four freedoms attached.
freedom 0: You have the freedom to run the program, for any purpose.
freedom 1: You have the freedom to modify the program to suit your needs.
freedom 2: You have the freedom to redistribute copies, either gratis
or for a fee.
freedom 3: You have the freedom to distribute modified versions of the
program, so that the community can benefit from your
improvements.
Since Eprints is under the GNU public license, it is has a license
attached to it that aims to protect these freedoms. Under the
license, the producers of Eprints are free to charge per download,
but they could not prevent another organization allowing zero-charge
downloads.
Free software is sometimes opposed to commercial software. That
is a false opposition. Commercial software is written for a
profit. Free software can also be written for a profit. For
example mySQL a leading free relational database software. It
is produced by a commercial company. I assume they make their money
consulting others on how to costumize and use it, rather
than on the software itself. I have no affiliation with the
company so I am not entirely sure.
I presume that Ingenta have similar things in mind. Plus,
they will be running services to run archives on behalf of
other organizations. The clients would choose to
let Ingenta run Eprints for them, rather than doing it
themselves.
I have been a champion of free access since 1993, when I put
the world's first free economics paper online, and I am the
the founder of RePEc, a very large FOS initative for economics.
I have had my fair share of arguments with Stevan in the past,
but on this occasion :-), he is spot on right, there is nothing
to worry about.
Cheers,
Thomas Krichel mailto:krichel_at_openlib.org
http://openlib.org/home/krichel
RePEc:per:1965-06-05:thomas_krichel
Received on Tue Jul 16 2002 - 15:27:26 BST