Z:gnu-www-ja-rms-nyu-2001-transcript--ecbd6f-So, why do I define it in term/en

So, why do I define it in terms of whether it's free software for you ? The reason is that sometimes the same program can be free software for some people, and non-free for others. Now, that might seem like a paradoxical situation, so let me give you an example to show you how it happens. A very big example &mdash; maybe the biggest ever &mdash; of this problem was the X Window System which was developed at MIT and released under a license that made it free software. If you got the MIT version with the MIT license, you had Freedoms One, Two, and Three. It was free software for you. But among those who got copies were various computer manufacturers that distributed Unix systems, and they made the necessary changes in X to run on their systems. You know, probably just a few thousand lines out of the hundreds of thousands of lines of X. And, then they compiled it, and they put the binaries into their Unix system and distributed it under the same non-disclosure agreement as the rest of the Unix system. And then, millions of people got these copies. They had the X Window System, but they had none of these freedoms. It was not free software for them.