Re: [tlug] Bill Gates and the GPL , let the flames begin

[Curt Sampson <cjs@example.com>]

On 2008-05-06 03:00 +0900 (Tue), Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:

> Curt Sampson writes:
> 
>  > So the open source community just lost several hours of development
>  > (one directly attributable to readline not being usable in BSD, and
>  > a few others that you might count for less because I'm moody), and
>  > will doubtless lose many more for similar reasons, not even yet
>  > counting the time spent on actual editline development.
> 
> Since according to your account, no productive effort has yet been
> spent on editline development :-/ it's all in the future.

Hm? You might argue about how "productive" the effort is, but the entire
library is there, and has had hundreds of developer-hours put in to it.

>     Ask yourself, do you honestly think that Steve Baur's struggles
>     with closed-source drivers for his display are a good thing, and
>     that not only he, but his customers and others who would get free,
>     open-source software if only he had some free time to hack it,
>     should not have it because x.org doesn't use the GPL?

Hm. The implication here seems to be that the drivers would be open
source if only x.org used the GPL. I think we both know that that's not
true. So what am I missing here? That Steve would be using much inferior
open-source drivers if even the closed-source ones weren't available for
his OS, and thus would be struggling less?

> Really, to lower your blood pressure (and raise that of copyleft
> advocates ;-) you (FVO you == Curt) should just think of the GPL as a
> proprietary license, as well as a free software license (as defined by
> all of the FSF, the OSI, and Larry Rosen's book).  Proprietary and
> free are not mutually exclusive; copyleft is a prominent example.

I'll buy that for a dollar. Though my blood pressure's just going to
get raised again by GPL advocates claiming then that it's not at all
proprietary, and is in fact the most free license out there, and it's
free speech, not free beer.

> On more quantitative terms, I think it's arguable that BSD-style
> licensing results in *more* free software than GPL does.

I don't know that it results in more free software, either, but it
results in tremendous other benefits to the free-software-using
community that the GPL tends to cut off.

BSD is easier to use for everyone because Ricoh, having "stolen" and
"proprietized" a bunch of BSD software without "giving it back to the
community", now has copiers that talk to BSD systems easily, out of the
box, immediately after plugging them in.

cjs
-- 
Curt Sampson       <cjs@example.com>        +81 90 7737 2974   
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