World’s First Pirate ISP Launches In Sweden

Post by tzs » Wed, Jul 21, 2010, 2:15 AM UTC

henrikschroder wrote: post #11

rick888 wrote: post #2

I wonder what the response would be like if there was a party dedicated to breaking the GPL. Piracy seems to be fine, but anybody that violates an open source license like the GPL gets demonized like they are a criminal.

Noone would care? The whole point of the GPL is to stop companies from profiting off of other's programs without also giving something back to the community. Noone in the "pirate movement" supports for-profit piracy or copyright infringement.

Have you read the writings of RMS and the FSF on why they created the GPL and what it is supposed to protect? What they say is nothing like what you say is the whole point.

Post by henrikschroder » Wed, Jul 21, 2010, 8:17 AM UTC

rick888 wrote: post #54

henrikschroder wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really? so the touchy-feely reasons that most people in the free software movement is a lie? I think you forgot a verb there? It's all to stop profits? This sure doesn't sound like "freedom" to me. I'm not really sure what you're ranting against, but the whole point of the GPL is to force "give some, get some", and to stop people from profiting off of other people's work. Freedom means you can do whatever the hell yo…

"I'm not really sure what you're ranting against, but the whole point of the GPL is to force "give some, get some", and to stop people from profiting off of other people's work." My point was that Richard Stallman for years claimed that this wasn't the reason. I also don't really think there was a problem with people "profiting off of other people's work" before the GPL became popular. When you release something for…

The whole point of the GPL is so people have the freedom to tinker with the source code (this has been said by Stallman many times). If we had no copyright laws, there would be nothing stopping people from releasing binaries only. The difference would be that you could share the copyrighted works with anybody.

Would this really benefit the community?

The flipside is also that everyone would be free to reverse-engineer everything, which is a pretty powerful good, but I see your point and I agree with it, it's probably better to have copyright than to not have it.

Then again, you could of course have a completely different society where all software must be available in source form by law, but I have a hard time seeing that happen anywhere. :-)

Re: World’s First Pirate ISP Launches In Sweden

Re: World’s First Pirate ISP Launches In Sweden