-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 This is a lot of text expressing a pretty strong opinion, but it seems to demonstrate a lack of understanding of the details of GNU, the GPL, and free software.
On Mon, Jan 05, 2015 at 17:18:12 +0100, Gergely Varju wrote: > When you say Free Software is a Free a sin Freedom, is the software > itself realy free in that sense? No. Software itself doesn't have free > will [...] Free software is about ensuring that _users_ have four essential freedoms: - https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html > Like getting paid for your work (as programmer), return on investment > to make sure investors finance R&D. They have pretty good moral > reasons, and once you are only against their property, against profit > your agenda will be a communist agenda, and if you are willing to hurt > other people to promote it you won't be any better than Stalin. There is nothing wrong with selling free software, support for that software, or services making use of that software. Your accusations seem to stem from something personal, because the FSF, nor GNU, has ever argued against selling free software. - https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html > Too bad that it doesn't matter how you change GPL in GPL v4 or any future > version you do it without consent of numerous software developers, and > without considering interests of the contributors. Much of your hostility seems rooted in this idea that the FSF will take GPL'd software with the "or later" clause (which is recommended, but not required) and somehow do something bad with it. Of course, "bad" is highly relative---GPLv3 is bad to some, even though it is still in lines with the goals of the FSF and free software. But to suggest that the community was not consulted is simply wrong: - http://gplv3.fsf.org/ If you do not trust the FSF, do not use "or later"; but note that you are then causing problems with future compatibility. Further, as the copyright holder, you are free to relicense your software at any point. In the case of software contributed to the GNU project for which the FSF holds copyright, the assignment paperwork ensures that the software will always remain free, regardless of how the GPL might change maliciously. So a malicious change to the GPL would not do projects like GNU much good, because they have other legal requirements. RMS originally added this clause to ensure that GNU software could never be made proprietary in the event that the FSF was somehow acquired or taken over by a malicious entity. > You speak about commercial forks for LLVM/Clang. Let me ask a question: Why > can't GNU project create a GPL fork for it? Why? We have GCC. LLVM is a competitor. > * You aren't free to decide about what you want to do with your own > work. Because of copyleft. You certainly are. You are the copyright holder. You are free to relicense, or even ignore your own license entirely. If you license your code under the GPL, and someone asks you for the source code, and you refuse to provide it, you have legally done nothing wrong. You will have lost trust in the community. If you are *not* the copyright holder of the GPL'd code, then you are legally bound by the GPL as a distributor. > * You aren't free to decide what to do if the old license gets > obsolete. Because your license doesn't let them to switch if it is the case. Covered above. > * You aren't free to back out if you don't like the direction GPL > takes, as there is no way to back out at new version. Do not use the "or later" clause, if you are worried. But again, that's discouraged. > * GPL isn't about a free market, as it works like a virus (see my > argument for GPL forks) it tries to take over the whole software licensing > in the world. Without exceptions. Can you substantiate this statement? > With free software you as end user aren't free to decide which > software you use on a GPL infested system. Free market and fair > competition is impaired. The GPL imposes no restrictions on the software that you run on your system. > Yet we discovered a huge backdoor functionality in bash > this year. It would be much harder to notice an intentionally created but > well hidden security hole. Yet everyone has a good chance to submit such > code. Even the Islamic State, North Korea, etc. This does not differ from "open source". Indeed, your argument is in direct support of the concept of "open source". Free software is always superior, because it is free: - https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.html > So certain freedoms could be granted and enforced even for commercial > software. If you allow commercial software. Are you referring to proprietary software? Software can be both free and commercial, as I mentioned above. A free system doesn't disallow running proprietary software. And many free GNU/Linux distributions are commercial. > But if you understand what went wrong, create friendly license terms, etc. > you can still protect key freedoms. It is up to you to decide if you want to > grow with a really freedom focused path, or continue down the Stalinist road > to its bitter end. Hope you understand these concerns. Nothing you have mentioned is new. Please look over the resources on GNU's website: - https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/essays-and-articles.html Also consider looking at the history of free software and "open source" (Wikipedia is a good enough start) to see how each of your above concerns has been addressed over the years. - -- Mike Gerwitz Free Software Hacker | GNU Maintainer http://mikegerwitz.com FSF Member #5804 | GPG Key ID: 0x8EE30EAB -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1 iQIcBAEBAgAGBQJUq022AAoJEPIruBWO4w6rkrMQAKAnViePpY50szf1qeg6uikw 3Gz3VEtkrfhrp7v+dBXodI6nct3wovqUa96xzEnOCPHocOY2v5K62LC1a/OYMWZ5 dN+8SxdHX915ksoKhnnWy4FOPslHoS/chKi0V9HifMQdDBaArh2AL63B65OjL9jU AClsCxSGcRBvpboUD81GAokwg2+hm3DkHcyRgFQ1a/OUocXdM/RJPvRsKliwTXOa A1V2hIeFzDYPstpkJoKTEZK6AqjOyPAvlyA4lm2xJ4sjk0Dsas3LI5k0jZtNC1gF 12bkmdGPqZRNfgLl/xxuW1O0cLpygIXc0vnHHObVg8qLXUxd/HTN16y07OUY69cJ qvXrToJAs7V/nyPwC4xN+AtVHcYI7z38Ci1QdDTh3A1OCCif9ukhtHdBneEoRNIJ 84dODIzZ//VJ+Qj93hJsyH1rGE8/cuwTz897ztXTLtrkGgGF6BODoagshYFpfeGK WlknntEAukFACS4qs9Okqlvj5Fo0t0mbJhmXif2euBDkbAS/jBK7eku87Ze00cz9 hEF3VdMT5XvSUKATuSGFAllz1F+XpFkLgIfGtXSnUBNJs3npvb/QyUX+bfYLywBF JaHObPqhWxsahR+NGTLRnssPZ1MUlWZ9KLA/oAqJg+1hXznkW4hRTk3OTFR31UL2 No0wtsnxV21uKXYaCRgH =A8Wh -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- _______________________________________________ gnu-misc-discuss mailing list gnu-misc-discuss@gnu.org https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/gnu-misc-discuss
