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Show HN: Linenoise NG – GNU Readline Replacement, with UTF8 and Windows (BSD)

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Re: Show HN: Linenoise NG – GNU Readline Replacement, with UTF8 and Windows (BSD)

#31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This little haiku by RMS sums it up nicely: Using GPL is encroaching on our right to encroach on yours The "more" freedom you are speaking of is the freedom to choose to deny others freedom.

Let me preface my comment by saying that the purpose of my comment is to let you know why I, an unconverted heathen, do not find your chain of comments compelling. I do not mean to convince you of my point of view, or to refute your points, but tell you why I'm unmoved. Repeating the same mantra, more forcefully, does not make it any more convincing or true. I find RMS's reasoning fundamentally flawed, overly simplis…

Exactly, if you do an history check, GPL and similar restrictive licenses were used in the last decade a lot by companies wanting to retain control over the code, while BSD / MIT projects never incurred in the issues GPL-convinced people claimed to be the big risks, but effectively provided more freedom everybody.

However to be fully honest, there is something new in the horizon now. The fact is that AWS and other similar service provides are starting to make it almost impossible for BSD projects to use the old viable business model of selling services. Now that BSD projects are "embedded" into AWS (or other) as a "just use" products where all the problems are solved by the service provider, open source as we traditionally thought at it may be a bit at risk. It's not clear to me what the fix for this is. I'm not ok with removing rights from my OSS code, but I feel there is something wrong if the value generated by OSS code is captured mostly by big players selling services.

Re: Show HN: Linenoise NG – GNU Readline Replacement, with UTF8 and Windows (BSD)

#32
post #13
post #3

Can it switch between emacs and vi mode (like Deadline)?

Was that a typo? I've never heard of deadline and that's a pretty un-google-able word. GNU Readline has Emacs & Vi mode.

Phone "helping" me! I meant Readline.

Re: Show HN: Linenoise NG – GNU Readline Replacement, with UTF8 and Windows (BSD)

#34
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GNU Readline is GPL on purpose. It's not the GNU project's fault that Redis cannot use Readline. The Redis maintainer isn't interested in protecting user freedom with copyleft, which means that Redis has to live without Readline.

Why is GPL better than BSD for example. I have the full source code of Redis and I can do any change I like. Why is copyleft per se a better solution?

They both give roughly the same rights and benefits when using items under the license for your own purposes. The difference is when you want to redistribute. GPL says that when you redistribute, you cannot remove the freedoms you received in the first place. BSD says you can remove those freedoms.

GNU & GPL really are about freedom as in freedom of speech. They ensure items cannot get less free when redistributed. BSD etc are more about getting out of your way, so you can do almost anything you want on redistribution.

Copyleft matters to those who care about freedom first. The FSF has a good explanation: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html

Historically RMS has been seen as a bit of an alarmist over software related freedoms. However the passage of time often shows he isn't alarmist enough! Here is a good starter article from almost 20 years ago http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html

Re: Show HN: Linenoise NG – GNU Readline Replacement, with UTF8 and Windows (BSD)

#35
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are a lot of programs, which cannot use GPL for some of its restrictions, e.g. commercial software. But also in general, it is quite restrictive to have to change your softwares license just to use a certain library. Consequently, a lot of non-gpl open source software rather not uses readline than changing their license. I am very happy about any more liberally licensed alternative.

>There are a lot of programs, which cannot use GPL for some of its restrictions, e.g. commercial software. You mean proprietary software. People that write free software do not want their work used in software that does not guarantee that users will have the same freedoms that they gave to others. I think the thing that a lot of people overlook here is that the proprietary software developers want to impose their own…

> People that write free software do not want their work used in software that does not guarantee that users will have the same freedoms that they gave to others.

Take it easy: there are plenty of people writing free software that don't care about this. antirez answered you somewhere in this thread. Then there is BSD and Apache.

Re: Show HN: Linenoise NG – GNU Readline Replacement, with UTF8 and Windows (BSD)

#36
post #29

there are a lot of forks of linenoise out there now. this one looks good, but it's a big task to pick through all the divergent copies of the code and figure out which ones have genuine improvements and which ones are now rotting. there's a rust one too which i recently added mingw/msvc support to. that's actually an example of how this splintering could be causing problems because we've just vendored some upstream v…

That is one of the reason, why I renamed it the LINENOISE NG. The interface is compatible with the original LINENOISE, but it works on linux, Mac and Windows and it supports UTF-8.

Re: Show HN: Linenoise NG – GNU Readline Replacement, with UTF8 and Windows (BSD)

#37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This little haiku by RMS sums it up nicely: Using GPL is encroaching on our right to encroach on yours The "more" freedom you are speaking of is the freedom to choose to deny others freedom.

Let me preface my comment by saying that the purpose of my comment is to let you know why I, an unconverted heathen, do not find your chain of comments compelling. I do not mean to convince you of my point of view, or to refute your points, but tell you why I'm unmoved. Repeating the same mantra, more forcefully, does not make it any more convincing or true. I find RMS's reasoning fundamentally flawed, overly simplis…

My understanding of the freedom for GPL is to guarantee the end user to have the freedom. What freedom does a user of a software have if all the open source code is used by some proprietary software? Of course, this does not guarantee freedom to developers, the users of these free software libraries. As an end user of software I like the concept of the GPL and the freedoms it wants to provide, but as a developer not so much (unless I am going to release it GPL anyways).

Re: Show HN: Linenoise NG – GNU Readline Replacement, with UTF8 and Windows (BSD)

#38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This little haiku by RMS sums it up nicely: Using GPL is encroaching on our right to encroach on yours The "more" freedom you are speaking of is the freedom to choose to deny others freedom.

Let me preface my comment by saying that the purpose of my comment is to let you know why I, an unconverted heathen, do not find your chain of comments compelling. I do not mean to convince you of my point of view, or to refute your points, but tell you why I'm unmoved. Repeating the same mantra, more forcefully, does not make it any more convincing or true. I find RMS's reasoning fundamentally flawed, overly simplis…

You've made a claim that GPL denies you, and all users, freedoms, but you haven't explained why. I for one, as a GPL advocate, would be interested to hear your reasoning.

Re: Show HN: Linenoise NG – GNU Readline Replacement, with UTF8 and Windows (BSD)

#40
post #11
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not everyone can or wants to use the GPL. We don't live in an ideal, purely altruistic world.

+1 There are even a lot of other OPEN SOURCE projects with licenses (Apache, BSD) which cannot use readline because of their restricted GPL (instead of LGPL).

Well, this isn't correct, it's just that the result would have to be distributed under terms of GPL. (Assuming the license is GPL compatible, which most of the ones you mentioned are).
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