[GRASS5] Terminology: Free Software

[Markus Neteler]

On Wed, Oct 10, 2001 at 12:22:11PM +0200, Bernhard Reiter wrote:
> On Wed, Oct 10, 2001 at 12:06:09PM +0200, Roger Bivand wrote:
[...]
> > So a formal description is:
> 
> > "The Geographic Resources Analysis and Support System (GRASS)
> > Geographic Information System (GIS) is Copyright by the
> > GRASS Development Team headquartered at Baylor University,
> > in Waco, Texas.
> > 
> > This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it
> > under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the
> > Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your
> > option) any later version."
> > 
> > as in ./COPYING
> 
> It is correct, except that the development of the 5.x versions
> basically were based in Hannover, lead my Markus Neteler and
> are now based in Trento, Italy, still lead my Markus.
> 
> However this version is long and does not explain that a lot of people
> call Free Software "open source".

A suggestion in general:
 - we should change the phrase on the web page to something better
 - we should also change the GRASS login message which doesn't
   reflect the structure of the team.
 - I don't mind to skip "headquarter", maybe we use the URL instead
   "GRASS is available at: http://..."

As also suggested by Roger Bivand (personal mail), we should have
a look at the phrases used by "R". Their project has a similar structure
with developers spreaded everywhere.

Roger Bivand wrote:
[...]
R uses a Development Core Team, and says:
 
"The bulk of this code is copyright by members of or all of the R
Development Core Team.
 
See the file COPYING for the exact conditions under which you may
redistribute it."
[...]

This is simple, but better than what we currently have.

Just my 0.02 Euro,

 Markus