NoMachine
Is there any change to connect to a NoMachine NX server by a free softwore client? i guess the NX client provided by NoMachine is not free, is it?
http://www.nomachine.com
Looks like there are plenty of choices. Read the license section and the clients sections here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NX_technology#License
Many of those are in Trisquel repositories as well.
thank you!
i built OpenNX from source and it works! yeah.
though i still have some question regarding free software.
OpenNX seems to just be a GUI which comes with GNU LESSER GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE Version 2.1, February 1999. That is free software, right?
The actual remote connection is handled by nxssh, which i needed to download from nomachine's website and building it.
it is provided as "open source" (http://www.nomachine.com/sources.php) does that mean free software as in freedom? it don't say any about GPL or something.
Also why is some code provided by nomachine (libxcomp and libxcompshad) within the trisquel repositories, and nxssh is not?
please help me understand the thing about freedom
Yes, the GNU Lesser General Public License is a free software license.
Most software that is described as open source also qualifies as free software. You'd have to check the actual license of the software in question to be sure, though. The GPL isn't the only free software license, so that may be why it doesn't say anything about it.
I am a member!
Be careful with installing software outside the Trisquel repository.
Figuring out if something is free software or not is challenging. More frequently than not people use the term "open source" to describe software that has non-free dependencies. There are few completely free solutions out there. What you see in Trisquel is by far most / or the largest collection of it. If it's in Ubuntu and not in Trisquel don't install it. There is a reason for it being excluded related to free software.
See if this package is in Ubuntu by using the online search facility at:
If the package is in Ubuntu and you can't find it in Trisquel there is an issue of some kind:
As stated LGPL is a free software license.
>The actual remote connection is handled by nxssh, which i needed to download from nomachine's website and building it. it is provided as "open source" (http://www.nomachine.com/sources.php) does that mean free software as in freedom? it don't say any about GPL or something.
If you look at the nxssh tarball, it contains a file named LICENSE which says "all components are under a BSD licence, or a licence more free than that". The BSD licenses [1] are well known free software licenses. If you read through the file you'll notice that all the mentioned licenses indeed do comply with the free software definition [2]. Often tarballs contain a file named copying, license, copyright or similar containing the licensing information.
>Also why is some code provided by nomachine (libxcomp and libxcompshad) within the trisquel repositories, and nxssh is not?
Perhaps it's a newer development. There is a lot of free software that isn't yet (if ever) in the repositories of the big GNU/Linux distributions.
Another related subject you might want to read about is license proliferation [3]. The world is complex enough without people trying to make it more so!
Hope you find this educational!
[1] http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html
[2] http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/License_proliferation