Traduction de "Intro les 4 derniers paragraphes": appel à relecture

[José FOURNIER <jaa.f AT cegetel.net>]

Bonjour à tous,

voici ma traduction des 4 derniers paragraphes de l'introduction du site 
April.
Merci à ceux qui voudront bien me relire et me corriger.
J'ai ajouté le texte en français sur lequel je suggère quelques corrections.

Cordialement

José

Attachment: Intro 4 der corections texte fr.odt
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What is copyleft ?

The simplest way to make a program free, is to distribute it in the public domain, without copyright. This allows people to share the program and its improvements if they want. But it also allows indelicate persons to make the program a copyrighted program. They may as well introduce changes and distribute the result as a copyrighted product. People who then receive the program in its transformed form, do not get the liberties granted by the original author; the intermediary has removed them.

The objective of the GNU project is to give all users the rights to redistribute and to modify GNU software. If retailers could remove these liberties, there would be a lot of users, but these users would not have any liberty. Therefore, instead of placing GNU Software in the Public Domain, the GNU project put it under 'Copyleft'. Copyleft states that anyone who transmits a program, with or without modifications, has also to grant the liberty to run, copy, modify and distribute it. Copyleft guaranties this liberties for every users.

Copyleft has other advantages. People improving free programs often work for companies or universities which are ready to do anything to make money. A programmer could want to offer his improvements to the community, but his employer could get angry and urge him to make his work a commercial product.

When the employer is told that it is illegal to distribute the modified version in an other way than as free software, generally, the employer prefers to give up rather than discard the program and the work already done.

To place a program under Copyleft, one must put it first under Copyright, then add provisions to legally secure the right for everybody to run it, access its code, modify and transmit it or all the derivative programs, provided that the initial distribution conditions are preserved. That way, the program code and the liberties attached to it, can not be separated.

The developers of copyrighted programs use copyright in order to reduce the user 's liberty; the GNU project uses copyright to ensure that the liberty to use, modify and transmit the program will not be removed. It is the reason why this principle is called copyleft, in opposition to copyright.

Copyleft is a general term; there are many ways to implement it. The GNU project put the specific distribution conditions into the General Public License GNU (GNU GPL). A variant, the Library General Public License GNU (GNU LGPL), applies to some libraries (but not to all of them). The LGPL allows the use of them to link the executable files copyrighted under specific conditions.

The appropriate license is included in many manuals and in every GNU source code distribution (generally in files called COPYING and COPYING.LIB).

The GNU GPL is designed in order that you can apply it to your program if you are the holder of the copyright. You don't need to modify the GNU GPL but only have to add some notes at the end of your program which make adequate reference to the GNU GPL.

If you want to place you program under copyleft with the GNU GPL, read the instruction at the end of the text of the GPL. If you want to place your library under copyleft with the GNU LGPL, read the text at the end of the LGPL (note that you can also use the GPL for your libraries).

Using the same distribution conditions for several different programs makes the copy of code easier between the different programs. If they have the same distribution conditions, one hasn't to bother with conditions compatibility. The LGPL contains a clause that allows you to change the distribution conditions of the ordinary GPL so that you can copy code into an other program covered by the GPL.

Free software is more reliable !

The apologists of proprietary software often say, ``free software is a beautiful dream, but we all know that only proprietary software can produce reliable products. A group of hackers cannot do the same.''

Nonetheless, these thesis doesn't match the empiric evidence, scientific tests proved that free software is more reliable than a comparable proprietary software.

In 1990 and 1995, Barton P. Miller and his colleagues tested the reliability of Unix utility programs. Each time, the GNU utility programs won with a comfortable advance. They tested 7 commercial Unix systems, as well as the GNU system. When applied a random data input flow, 40% (in the worst case) of the basic utility programs crashed (with a core dump) or hung in a everlasting loop.

These researchers discovered that the failure rates of the commercial Unix systems ranged from 15% to 43% versus a 7% rate for the GNU system.

Miller also said: ``all systems we compared between 1990 and 1995 noticeably improved in reliability, but still had signigicant rates of failure. The reliability of the basic utilities from GNU and Linux were noticeably better than those of the commercial systems)''.

For more details, refer to their document (available at ftp://grilled.cs.wisc.edu/technical/_papers/fuzz-revisited.ps');Fuzz Revisited: a Re-examination of the Reliability of Unix Utilities and services by Barton P. Miller

To sale Free Software

Many people think that the idea of Free Software is to distribute programs copies gratis, or at a very low price: just enough to compensate for the costs.

In fact, the Free Software Foundation encourages those who distribute free software to sale it the price they want or they can. If this surprises you, please go on reading.

The English word 'free' has two meanings, it can refer to price as well as to Liberty. When we are speaking of free software, we are speaking of Liberty, not price. More particularly, it means that users are free to utilize a program, to modify it, and to distribute it, with or without modifications.

Proprietary software are often sold at a high price but, sometimes, a retailer may give you a free copy. This doesn't make it free software. Whether it is gratis or paying, the program is not free because users do not have any liberty.

As far as the price doesn't matter, while we are speaking of free software, a low price doesn't make software more free. So, if you re-distribute copies of a free program, you can as well sell it a high price or just cover the costs. Re-distribution of software is an honorable and totally lawful activity; if you exercises it, you may make money on it.

Free software is the project of a whole community, and all those who depends on it should search means to support it. For a distributor, the way to contribute is to reverse a part of its profit to the FSF or to an other free software development project. By creating development teams, you make free software progress.

The distribution of free software is an opportunity to raise funds for development. Don't let it pass its way !

Liberty is the point, the only one, the unique one.

Free Software examples

Hereafter are some examples of free foftware

• The Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD operating systems.
• The TeX, LaTeX and Lyx environments to edit texts.
• The Gimp (which is regarded as a serious competitor to Photoshop) and Povray image treatment environments.
• The GNU Emacs, XEmacs and Vim editors.
• The XFree86 graphical environment.
• The Gcc, G++, Perl, Python, Scheme, Caml, Tcl/Tk and MesaGL development environments.
• The MySQL and Postgres data bases.
• All the GNU tools such as Gawk and Gmake.
• The Web Apache,the Inn newsgroups and the Sendmail mail server.
• Samba which allows you to use a Unix machine as a file and printer server for clients under Macintosh or Windows, as well as to access the shared data of these machines.