My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL
drewdevault.com
My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL
1–10 of 431 posts
Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL
#2This very clearly and simply describes the differences between absolute freedom, limited freedom, and the value of limiting freedom.
In a way, it's similar to the paradox of tolerance, and a tolerant society needing to be intolerant of those that are intolerant.
Or to quote Team America: freedom isn't free.
I may be re-thinking my own use of BSD licensing in favour of something more copyleft in future too.
Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL
#3This includes a cynical view of capitalism, too.
Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL
#4This very clearly and simply describes the differences between absolute freedom, limited freedom, and the value of limiting freedom. In a way, it's similar to the paradox of tolerance, and a tolerant society needing to be intolerant of those that are intolerant. Or to quote Team America: freedom isn't free. I may be re-thinking my own use of BSD licensing in favour of something more copyleft in future too.
> In a way, it's similar to the paradox of tolerance, and a tolerant society needing to be intolerant of those that are intolerant.
That's not a paradox; you're just intolerant. Whether you're right or wrong to be so is immaterial, as is whether the people you're intolerant of are also intolerant.
Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL
#5This includes a cynical view of capitalism, too.
Software is full of tiny monopolies and it's standard consensus that monopolies cause the market to fail.
Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL
#6> Capitalism is about enriching yourself - not enriching your users and certainly not enriching society.
Capitalism is not about enriching anyone, it's about being free to do whatever you want with your resources.
Free software developers use their resources to enrich society (and I applaud their work). Mark Zuckerberg uses his resources to enrich himself. Both are being capitalistic, as long as they don't steal or kill (I'm sorry, Hans Reiser). They freely decide who to work for.
Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL
#7I about to launch an open core SaaS and all these articles about open source software getting exploited and how copyleft should be the way to go is getting me confused. The software is for e-commerce. So if users use it to make more money, is that considered commercial use? Would the copyleft license require them to get a commercial license then? Would this cause less adoption and less use of the software? What kind of license would protect us from someone coming along and replicating our open core model using the open source app?
Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL
#8This includes a cynical view of capitalism, too.
Self preservation or self interest is important. You can't really do much for others if you dont have your own stuff together. Having said that, modern capitalism is moving toward pure self interest and even exploitation of others. The author correctly identified the one freedom the GPL denies - the freedom to exploit the work of others purely for your own gain.
Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL
#9The links to 'blogs I follow' with preview at the bottom is neat;
> Generated by openring
https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/openring
Nice.
Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL
#10MIT-like freedom is the "freedom to sell yourself as a slave". GPL is "your liberty ends where my nose begins".
If you understand freedom as the removal of social constraints, you won't understand the value of something like GPL software or Wikipedia.
If, on the other side, you think of freedom as the capability to do things, the accumulation of knowledge in copyleft projects creates possibilities that are less likely in a permissive project, where anyone can capture a version under a proprietary license at any time and evolve it as closed source (compare the ecosystems of Linux and Android for a practical example).