E. The GNU Project.
GNU Pascal is part of the GNU project which was founded by Richard
Stallman in 1984. The aim of the GNU project is to provide a
complete operating system with editors, compilers etc. as
Free Software.
People often confuse Free Software with
public domain software or have other wrong information about
the GNU project. If you want to know it definitely, please read the
GNU General Public License.
For even more information, please consult the official
GNU home page of the Free Software Foundation (FSF),
Some small notes about common misunderstandings follow.
- It is legal to compile commercial, including non-free,
programs written in Pascal with GNU Pascal. They do not
automatically become Free Software themselves.
- "Free" is opposed to "proprietary", but not opposed
to "commercial". Free Softare can be -- and is in fact --
distributed commercially for a real price. In contrast, most
non-commercial software does not meet
the open source criteria
and thus does not qualify as Free Software.
- When you modify a free program released under the
GNU General Public License,
e.g. the GNU Pascal compiler itself, your modified work will become
Free Software, too.
- When using libraries for writing proprietary programs, check
the libraries' licenses carefully. The
GNU Lesser General Public License
allows linking a library to non-free software under certain
conditions, the ordinary GNU General Public License does not.
- It is legal to charge a fee for distributing Free Software. If
somebody sold you a copy of GNU Pascal you could have got without
paying for it as well, that's in agreement with the GNU
General Public License.
- However if somebody wants you to sign an agreement that you
won't re-distribute the Free Software you have got, it would be
illegal. That person would lose the right to use and distribute that
Free Software.
- The preferred form to distribute Free Software is in source
code. This ensures that everybody has the freedom to customize the
software or to fix bugs by themselves. When we also distribute GNU
Pascal binaries we do it only to simplify installation and to
encourage its use.
This document was generated
by Frank Heckenbach on May, 10 2002
using texi2html