theKompany.com Releases Aethera 1.1 (KDE.News) [LWN.net]

theKompany.com has released version 1.1 of Aethera, a cross-platform email/PIM/groupware client. "Aethera is offered for free under GPL in English, German and French while additional plugins for Jabber (including peer to peer file transfer), whiteboarding and voice over IP are offered commercially."

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commercial != proprietary

Posted Jul 8, 2004 7:28 UTC (Thu) by dd9jn (subscriber, #4459) [Link]

Will people never get it right: "commercial" is not the opposite of "free"!

There is and has ever been commercial Free Software (GPL, *BSD or whatever). Commercial means there is dedicated support, customer care etc. available for the software.

Using "commercial" instead of the correct terms "non-free" or "proprietary" harms those companies basing their business on (commercial) Free Software development and distribution.

commercial != for free

Posted Jul 8, 2004 11:28 UTC (Thu) by hingo (subscriber, #14792) [Link]

"commercial" indeed is a good opposite to "for free".

So there was no need to panic, was there? You could even start calling it Open Source, which then could be for free or commercial, whatever you'd prefer.

commercial != for free

Posted Jul 8, 2004 12:13 UTC (Thu) by dd9jn (subscriber, #4459) [Link]

I was not talking about "for free" but about "Free Software". As everyone in our community should known, this "free" is about freedom and not about free beer.

Open Source is a wishy-washy term sometimes even deliberately used by companies to have people associate it with Free Software even if they don't guarantee the essential freedoms; merely being allowed to look at the source is not sufficient. A hacker understands what "source" means, almost all people know what "freedom" is about. Thus open source is actually a bad term for the thing known as Free Software.

Freedom is not about money; think of Free Software like "freedom of markets", "free press", "in the free world".