Simon Josefsson <[email protected]> writes: > I'm not denying people have other arguments too, including your > technical/social arguments.
> That doesn't take away that some companies/governments/entities/people > has a dislike for strong copyleft licenses. It limits their ability to > do what they want to do, which usually include some non-freedom aligned > agenda. While this is also true, this argument has been abused repeatedly by the Free Software Foundation and others to excuse and dismiss obvious technical and social problems. I have heard "you should use our inferior software and put up with our obnoxious development culture because we're copyleft" so many times now, and I for one am no longer susceptible to that argument. If you don't want people to use a non-copyleft alternative, may I suggest writing better software? The coreutils folks are (very successfully!) following that strategy. At the moment, I think it's clear that coreutils is higher quality software than uutils, hence the significant pushback here against replacing it. The uutils folks doubtless have plans to improve their technical quality, and they have the advantage of using a programming language that has much better intrinsic tools for writing high-quality software, so maybe at some point they'll get there, but they're not there yet. The maintainers of coreutils are some of the best C programmers on the planet, so they're going to face stiff competition. The coreutils maintainers are also, in my experience, wonderfully low-drama and reasonable and enjoyable to interact with, which matters a great deal. (The uutils maintainers likely are as well; I've just not personally interacted with that project.) GnuPG, on the other hand, has been a nightmare to use for 20 years and is not getting any better, and I say that as someone who has written quite a few wrappers around it to accomplish various things and respects it as a substantial improvement over PGP (which was even worse). This is true even apart from the OpenPGP debacle, on which I have no informed personal opinion. It should not be surprising that people are jumping ship now that there's a reasonable alternative that doesn't behave in weird, inconsistent ways and or make one pull one's hair out each time one tries to use it. I understand and at least partially agree with the argument that it would have been better if that alternative were also copyleft, but the authors didn't choose that licensing scheme and wrote some solid free software that people prefer over GnuPG. Copyleft by itself is not going to keep most people on bad software. -- Russ Allbery ([email protected]) <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
