81–90 of 94 posts
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Uhm.. How does it feel to be trapped in Job's Reality Distortion Bubble?
In your reality, do all smartphones have touch interfaces? That's pretty much the definition of a revolution: when you can clearly point to a before and an after.
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Because they have no choice..
Read the BSD license. They definitely have a choice.
- Webkit = LGPL = No Choice
- LLVM because gcc is a no go (GPL)
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The GPL does not give a rat's patootie about users. The GPL is designed to ensure the maximum freedoms of developers . That it simultaneously destroys any hope that those same developers can enrich themselves by selling the software is supremely ironic, as it forces them to live as wage slaves under the whims of their corporate overlords. Thus they gain one sort of liberty but at the expense of giving up other econom…
The GPL proclaims its user-centric purpose right up front, and everything in it is about what developers must provide to users and permit them to do. Stallman is on record about freedom being much more important to him than making us or himself rich. I don't know why you'd bother to accuse them of ironically failing to achieve a goal they're clearly indifferent about. Every time society attaches a price tag to an unl…
Because selling copies is far more scalable and profitable?
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> Funnily enough, the GPL is also a walled garden environment That's quite a stretched definition of walled garden. GPL is easy: We believe consumers have rights. If you want to use software we write as parts of yours, we forbid you to disrespect those rights. Simple as that. Yes - their rights are more important than yours. It's not about the kids playing in the sandpit. It has always been about the kids that use -…
Whereas your definition is enormously abstract. I do get it. Just because I don't share your sad devotion to that ancient religion doesn't mean I don't understand it. I think you need to go do some research. There was a good bio on RMS that came out ~10 years ago, you should go read it.
I think your, to use some of the language you so cleverly brought up, sad misunderstanding of the dynamics at play pretty much demonstrates you don't enjoy a solid grasp of what is involved here and the consequences of licenses like the GPL.
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The GPL proclaims its user-centric purpose right up front, and everything in it is about what developers must provide to users and permit them to do. Stallman is on record about freedom being much more important to him than making us or himself rich. I don't know why you'd bother to accuse them of ironically failing to achieve a goal they're clearly indifferent about. Every time society attaches a price tag to an unl…
> Doctors don't sell medicine, plumbers don't sell pipe, why should developers sell copies of binaries rather than hours of work? Because selling copies is far more scalable and profitable?
The GPL proposes to give users that right. Since I am in that uncomfortable user position a lot, I am all for it.
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> If you want to make it completely free (as in, "I don't care what you do with it" free), use BSD Sadly, it's also free as "please, BigNastyCorp, feel free to take away any freedoms from your users who depend on my work". While BSD may be "more free" according to some, it's the freedoms of the users we are (or should be) protecting. For those, *GPL is the license of choice.
Actually, let me fix that for you: "please GPL, feel free to take my source code, slap the GPL on it and nanana at me when new changes are made that I now can't incorporate" Look at the whole OpenBSD wireless drivers fiasco that happened. Really us BSD guys have not much to worry about when it comes to corporations (I've had my BSD licensed source code used by big business, and they have donated money to my little di…
Does it really feel better when it's a multi-billion dollar making that? Does it feel better when they withhold their improvements (if any) from you and their users?
BTW, BSD allows that and BSD proponents insist that's perfectly fine to make proprietary forks of their software, that they don't care about what you make with the software. If you feed offended by what those people are doing - forking your software and giving users extra assurances you don't - maybe BSD should not be your choice anyway.
BSD is for when you don't care what people do with your code. If you wanted corporations to pay for your code, you could have gone GPL and offered a double license option. You cannot build a business on expecting donations from happy generous for-profit corporations. In their position, if I really wanted to pay for your work, I would not donate to your project - I would hire you.
And, personally, I too feel bad about you not being able to incorporate improvements made under the GPL to your code. If I ever made such contribution, I would make sure I also made it to your upstream BSD codebase, under BSD. The license of the project is your choice.
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> The GPL does not give a rat's patootie about users. Care to explain your reasoning? > The GPL is designed to ensure the maximum freedoms of developers. That's why it explicitly prohibits you from using GPL'ed code under proprietary licenses. No. If you intend to engage in an intelligent debate, you should, at least, educate yourself to a point you actually can. > That it simultaneously destroys any hope that those…
>> The GPL does not give a rat's patootie about users. >Care to explain your reasoning? >> The GPL is designed to ensure the maximum freedoms of developers. My reasoning is that the GPL is about what you can do with the code the program is based on. USERS don't do stuff with code. Programmers do stuff with code. A user is not going to take an annoying bug in your app and fix it, but (given guaranteed access to the so…
They use it, they trust it works and they hire programmers to do stuff on their behalf.
> but (given guaranteed access to the source) a developer might.
Do you know of any other license that guarantees access to source from every downstream fork?
If they consider an ability to ship the software more important than users' freedoms (in GPL sense), they should've been using appropriate license. I'm not saying GPL is a good or bad choice, but talking about being responsible in (licensing) decisions and statements.
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> WebKit doesn't count because they were forced to contribute back as KHTML was LGPL Curiously, I don't remember them being "forced" to use KHTML as their starting point...
I never said they were forced to use khtml, I said because they chose khtml they were forced to contribute back because it's under the LGPL.
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"Open source" is a misleading term, please stop using it: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.h... As pointed out in other replies, Apple is working on clang because it doesn't want to deal with the GPL (unless you own Apple stock, you're the one losing because of this decision), and WebKit because it's derived from LGPL code. How much work is Apple putting into making Darwin a usable Free Soft…
For many individual developers and most companies, a permissive free software license like BSD may be a better choice than a restrictive one like GPL. Companies like Google are releasing all sorts of code under BSD on the off chance it gets used, or maybe even improved, or maybe even becomes some sort of de facto standard. Releasing the code under GPL would mostly disincentivize these behaviors.
There's also no reason why you can't dual-license a product, or license different parts of the same codebase under different licenses (for example, I release the unit test files in my Free Software projects into the public domain).