Re: Some hard numbers on licenses used by elisp packages

[Richard Stallman]

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  > What is the motivating factor for the authors who have not assigned any
  > license to their package? That open source software should be covered bye 
one
  > clearly stated open source license?

I suspect part of the cause is the influence of the "open source"
idea.

In the free software movement, the point a free program is to give
users freedom.  The license is what gives users that freedom, so the
choice of the best free license is a very important question, and
applying the license properly is crucial.

The "open source" idea tends to make "good code" the highest value,
and treats "giving users freedom" as secondary.  While the original
leaders of open source treated licenses as important, the ideas have
evolved over the last ten years to dismiss licenses as a minor detail.

Under the malign influence of GitHub, developers often don't bother to
put on a license.  This means the program is not free software (nor
open source either).

https://gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.html explains
the difference between free software and open source, especially at
the level of ideas.

This is part of why, in the GNU Project, we never use the term "open
source" to describe what we are doing.

-- 
Dr Richard Stallman
President, Free Software Foundation (gnu.org, fsf.org)
Internet Hall-of-Famer (internethalloffame.org)
Skype: No way! See stallman.org/skype.html.