51–60 of 104 posts
This surprises anyone? As far as the FSF (or at least Stallman, which for all practical purposes is the same thing) is concerned, LibreCAD and FreeCAD are in the wrong here — for using one of the FSF's own licenses . Stallman is a zealot, and this is what zealots do.
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There is always the need for somebody to stand up as the opposing side to those who seek to build their business on abusive practices such as vendor lock-in or DRM. The FSF is that voice, and it's a more important role than ever. For example, the FSF has long warned of the dangers of DRM, and in recent years these warnings have proved themselves prescient now that we have things like Amazon remotely wiping Kindles on…
Cannot imagine the world without FSF. Thank god for FSF and RMS.
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Well the FSF purports to be an organization that advances the cause of free software, so it's worth calling them on their bullshit. Not everyone thinks of them as a zealot organization even though it's headed by a zealot. Perhaps they should. Also I think this issue might be fixable if there's enough outcry about it. And they really are in a tough situation because of this.
It's been well known for a long time that the FSF is only interested in advancing their own idea of "free software." At this time it's the GPLv3 flavor of free software. For people who don't agree with the FSF's idea of "free software" or don't want the politics that goes along with the GPL and FSF, there's always the BSD license. Though it really wouldn't help in this case, since the library in question belongs to t…
Anyone surprised by the fact that the FSF puts its principles about the purity of free software licenses before pragmatism hasn't been paying much attention. The GPLv3 is the flagship license of the FSF and they think it fixes some issues with the GPLv2, so it's hardly surprising that they will refuse to relicense their high priority projects under the older license. "But you'll gain more users" has never been a reas…
LibreCAD doesn't hold the copyright, so they can't change the license. The copyright is held by a private company with no particular incentive to make the Free product better, especially since the paid product wouldn't be able to use the LibreDWG code.
This story only seems to be a case of political pressure to do so, regardless of the effort a rewrite may cause. In this regards, FSF is clearly putting the value of the license above the value of the software itself.
This is why I can't endorse the GPL: it is mainly motivated and designed to deny authority over software ownership, not for actual openness. If somebody really want to open up a piece of software, Public Domain is the way to go.
I have a hard time describing any license that limits your rights as one promoting freedom. I never understood why the FSF wasn't more behind the BSD style licenses.
Why not provide a way for users to download the library separately and execute it as a binary blob? That way, if there's a license violation, it is the responsibility of the user. Kind of like libdvdcss and Handbrake? On the other hand, it seems odd to me that the kind of person who would be hung up by licenses is interested in using free software. Why not just buy AutoCad at this point? I guess that's sort of the FS…
Your answers are found in the saga of the readline wars (where every imaginable method to run around the GPL and make it meaningless has been tried). Broadly speaking the rule of thumb is that if something makes use of internal knowledge of GPL code implementation or function (i.e. unique data structures/objects/functions that are not considered "standard"), it's considered a derivative work (this is also how the Lin…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your answers are found in the saga of the readline wars (where every imaginable method to run around the GPL and make it meaningless has been tried). Broadly speaking the rule of thumb is that if something makes use of internal knowledge of GPL code implementation or function (i.e. unique data structures/objects/functions that are not considered "standard"), it's considered a derivative work (this is also how the Lin…
What I never really understood was why nobody ever cloned readline? Clisp was open sourced because they used readline, but they already had a completely working common lisp system with everything -- how hard can it be to write a readline library?
http://cvsweb.netbsd.org/bsdweb.cgi/src/lib/libedit/?sortby=...
The BSD crowd has been slowly chipping away at replacing all the GNU stuff they expediently adopted following the AT&T lawsuit.