> Many people (especially in the open source community) hate the GPL more > than they hate proprietary software, especially the GPLv3. I never found > an approach that works with those people.
I find BSD people to be the loudest about this. The "open source" people don't seem to give two shits as long as they can see the source in my experience. > Mention "freedom" and they'll say the GPL is "restrictive" and "viral". Many people who think that are anarchist who also think they should be allowed to kill. > Mention practical advantages and they'll say "corporations don't touch > anything GPL". Those people are simply wrong. Many companies use and contribute to GPL licensed software. > Mention the dangers of proprietary software and they'll say it doesn't > matter if the program in question is practically better. You won't convince these people to think that freedom is important. They only care about usability and sometimes about cost. It is a shame that some people think that malware can be better in any way. > Mention existing famous GPL projects and they'll argue that some of them > didn't switch to GPLv3 (like Linux and Blender). Most of those people don't even know the differences between GPLv2 and GPLv3 or why some changes vere made. They only know about GPLv3 being longer and reject it based on that. These are often people who use X11/Expat or BSD licenses just because they are short and easy to understand. They don't care about freedom. Making their own life easy is all that's important to them. > Actually, mentioning the GPL at all will get you covered with insults > and accusations of zealotry. It is always a bit funny when zealots call others that. > Showing them articles from GNU.org doesn't work, and will only result in > ad hominem attacks against their author, Richard Stallman. Very rarely do they bother to even read those articles. > This reminds me of Two Minutes Hate from 1984. > > How to reason with those people? They tend to gang up and it's very hard > to get your point across when everybody is agreeing with one another on > how stupid and brainwashed you are! You can't reason with people who only care about their own life and not about helping the humanity. I would recommend not going to the channels and talking about it publicly but trying to spot the less brainwashed individuals and talk to them in private and after you have gotten a few of them on your side you could possibly try to bring it up on the channel.
