On 17-Feb-07, at 3:54 PM, Debarshi 'Rishi' Ray wrote:

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since it doesn't allow commercial distribution of a modified version

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it is open source. however the license is not recognised by OSI - and scilab makes this very clear on its own web site

Even more reason to stay away from the thing called "open source".

last I heard you were programming zope - why dont you stick to GPL'd software? It is precisely the OSI (Open Source without the 'F') that has brought a huge amount of software to be available to the public, which would have never happened if the FOSS movement had been left in the hands of narrow-minded fanatics. The OSS movement started here:

http://linuxgazette.net/issue28/rossum.html

with attendance from people like Linus Torvalds (Linux kernel), Steve Allman (Sendmail), Guido von Rossum (Python), Eric Raymond (Fetchmail), Tim O'reilly and many others. These people breathed life into the FOSS movement which was being stifled by the dogmatic rantings of Stallman et al. And it is the 'thing called open source' which is in most demand today - evinced by the fact that even the FSF in India is rumoured to be switching to python, postgresql, django, apache for it's websites. Why dont they stick the GPL'd stuff? Because it is totally impractical and they know it. But it doesnt prevent them from making 'holier than thou' statements and sneering at things they are incapable of understanding.

Yes, GPL has it's place - especialy in the world of libraries and embedded software and I am again and again thrilled to see the words 'GPL' on dlink documentation. Long live Harald Welte. But it is not the be-all and end-all of things.

So I suggest you guys stop persecuting scilab and concentrate on stating some policy on what you call 'web services' - all the proprietary software from google, yahoo et al which you are happily using because there is no fatwa from FSF in this regard.