71–80 of 92 posts
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I honestly can't imagine any reasonable person arguing that GPL/LGPL have brought absolutely no societal good. Are you thinking of anybody in particular?
"no societal good" != "more societal good than alternatives"
> therecipe/qt is the most mature Qt binding for Go. It works by making IPC calls to a separate C++ binary downloaded at runtime from a site under the maintainer's control. WTF?
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There's a whole handful of permissively-licensed, feature-matched alternatives to GNU Readline that I suspect only exist due to political aversions to its license. It saddens me that these people would rather waste time treading over the same paths others have just to increase the potential for nonfree software, rather than using that time to write free and useful things.
That's your definition of "useful", not mine. "political aversion"? We are talking about money and business here. If a commercial company wants to ship a product without reinventing all the wheels, they are going to use code with permissive licenses, and skip projects with GPL license or similar in a heartbeat. You could even argue quite the contrary -- when you make your project GPL/AGPL etc, and if it is big/impact…
Did you know that there's no rule against commercializing or selling free software? The only reason that companies skip projects with copyleft licenses that's relevant in this discussion is because they intend to incorporate them into proprietary software, and this is because they are, by some deeply corporatistic scruple, incapable of conceiving of the idea of delivering free software (even if 90% of the heavy lifting in their services is done by free programs).
> You could even argue quite the contrary -- when you make your project GPL/AGPL etc, and if it is big/impactful enough, people will inevitably create alternative projects with permissive licenses that tried to match the feature set, and it is you that is the cause of all this "waste of time". Not necessarily a good argument, but there is some truth there.
Yes, it's not a good argument. The truth there is that if I develop a free program or library under (L)GPL or similar then I have made that thing free. If people want to write an alternative for technical reasons, then that's neither here nor there, but if people want to write an alternative because they don't like the license, then that's their own time they are wasting, because they would have no other reason to do it other than wanting to incorporate it into nonfree software.
> therecipe/qt is the most mature Qt binding for Go. It works by making IPC calls to a separate C++ binary downloaded at runtime from a site under the maintainer's control. WTF?
Reminds me of PS/Tk, a cross-platform, cross-implementation GUI library for Scheme that worked by opening a pipe to a Tcl/Tk process and communicating with that. It actually worked fairly well, though it's sadly abandoned now. I contributed somewhat by getting it working for Gambit.
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"no societal good" != "more societal good than alternatives"
The opposite of "some societal good" isn't "less societal good than other alternatives", it's "no societal good". The original statement didn't contain any comparisons. Even the worst alternative can still have some societal good.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"no societal good" != "more societal good than alternatives"
The opposite of "some societal good" isn't "less societal good than other alternatives", it's "no societal good". The original statement didn't contain any comparisons. Even the worst alternative can still have some societal good.
> therecipe/qt is the most mature Qt binding for Go. It works by making IPC calls to a separate C++ binary downloaded at runtime from a site under the maintainer's control. WTF?
> therecipe/qt is the most mature Qt binding for Go. It works by making IPC calls to a separate C++ binary downloaded at runtime from a site under the maintainer's control. WTF?
Yea.. that sounds like a non-starter for use.
I'd also wager that a FLOSS binding to a non-FLOSS framework with steep licensing fees would also kill this option for most.
If you really like Go and you're already willing to adopt a solution based in making IPC calls to separate processes just to put together a GUI...
...why not write your GUI app in something production-ready that makes sense to write a GUI, and have that call your Go process ?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The opposite of "some societal good" isn't "less societal good than other alternatives", it's "no societal good". The original statement didn't contain any comparisons. Even the worst alternative can still have some societal good.
Not if you take "some societal good" to mean "some [marginal] societal good"