[Aldor-l] Aldor is or is not free?

[Timo Jyrinki]

Hello,

I'm a bit puzzled by the Axiom's front page announcement that "Aldor is 
now Free". The petition "Free Aldor" specifically claims for example that 
"However, the license does not qualify as a free or open source license.", 
ie. it would be hoped that Aldor would be released under such a license.

However, it seems Aldor has so far only been published under a so-called 
"Aldor Public License 2.0", which prohibits any usage that may be somehow 
commercial, making the license clearly not open source and not free 
software. Open Source requirements in The Open Source Definition 
(http://www.opensource.org/docs/osd) and Free Software Definition 
(http://www.fsf.org/licensing/essays/free-sw.html) clearly state this. The 
Open Source Definition has the "No Discrimination Against Fields of 
Endeavor" (including business) requirement, and Free Software Definition 
states "...you should be free to redistribute copies, either with or 
without modifications, either gratis or charging a fee for 
distribution...".

As long as Aldor is not made truly free/open source, it cannot be included 
in for example Linux distributions like Debian, Fedora, openSUSE and 
Ubuntu. It also cannot be made part of Axiom, which is already free 
software.

I hope the recent source release is only a beginning, and the next code 
release may be made under a OSI-approved license. If this is a case of 
knowledge about license issues not being spread to places necessary, 
could someone communicate about the issue further? Meanwhile, the front 
page could be also corrected to reflect the fact that Aldor is not yet 
Free, only made more accessible to some people.

Best Regards,
Timo Jyrinki