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Comment by jamesaguilar | Hacker News Reader

Nope. The NCSA license is considered a free software license and is GPL compatible according to the FSF. http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html

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That's fucking great, my uncle bob thinks it is too, but we're talking about RMS not the FSF.

Do you even know who Richard Stallman is?

Yes, I just imagined that despite his polemic nature there were still other people who could put up with dealing with him who also were part of the FSF and therefore the FSF could hold positions divergent from those of RMS.

If the FSF consists solely of the opinions of RMS then I retract the previous statement and would say that the page mentioned expresses an opinion inconsistent with what is expressed in the email.

Generally speaking, the FSF and RMS agree. Nothing in the thread is inconsistent with this. RMS observes that the NCSA isn't copyleft, which is true, but that's a different dimension than free versus non-free.

But not different than free vs. open source.

"The values of free software are fundamentally different from the values of open source, which make "better code" the ultimate goal."

Clang wants to make a great compiler, they chose the NCSA license to facilitate that, according to the article makes it open source software and not 'free software' rather than 'unfree software'

Values and the question of whether a given license meets RMS's technical requirements for being free software are also two different metrics. He even explains that in this email. OSS puts an emphasis on the practical benefit of open source, whereas free software emphasizes the principle. And RMS never calls Clang nonfree in this email, he talks about nonfree derivatives of Clang.

So clang according to RMS is free as in freedom software that harms the free software movement because their unconcerned about freedom, rather than open source software that harms the free software movement because they are unconcerned about freedom.

I get you now, makes perfect sense.

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