[Ilugc] We Don't Need the GPL Anymore
- From: ee01b098@xxxxxxxxxxxxx (Ayan Chakrabarti)
- Date: Fri Jul 1 21:19:12 2005
Hey,
Well., I think the Free Software movement would not have survived this
long had it not been for the copy-left. Ditching it now is not a good
idea. A person who is really concerned about his user's freedom., wont
hesitate to publish his source code out no matter where he derived it
from. Only people who have ideas of lifting community work for personal
gain would be threatened by the GPL. Now., these people obviously need
to be threatened and forced., coz thats the healthy way towards the
community.
I couldn't agree more. The BSD licenses and public domain in general has
been around longer, but its the GPL that catalyzed the free-software /
open source movement.
It makes sense .. if you're going to put effort into making something and
give it away for free because you believe in certain principles, the
last thing you want is some money-grabbing cheapskate to take it, convert
it to a commercial product and then lock everybody else out of the source.
If you see the indignation that the developers of mplayer and pear pc
felt when their code got lifted and used by unscrupulous companies,
you'll realize its very unlikely that too many of them would've put in the
effort in the first place without the protection of the GPL.
Nobody's being forced to use GPL'ed code. And if you're using code that's
freely been given to you by someone else, there's nothing "unethical"
about being expected to make your final product available under the same
license. The only people who would object are people who want to use
GPL'ed code to cut short their developmental cycle, and profit.
Free software authors write free software because they believe that
end users should have certain rights - if you don't believe that, you
shouldn't use free software sources in your program. If you think you
deserve to be paid for your efforts, you should actually go and put in
that effort and write code from scratch.
And I call BS on the funda that doing away with the GPL will help the open
source movement get close to corporations. The open-source community
doesn't benefit when companies start using GPL'ed software, they benefit
when they start contributing back. Do you think IBM would contribute its
changes back to the community if it were not for the GPL ? Even if it had
altruistic managers who wanted to give back code out of the goodness of
their heart, they would be innundated with shareholder lawsuits for
letting go of a profit opportunity without good reason, and for giving
away IP that could, in the absence of the protection of the GPL, be used
by its own competitors.
And ESR., well.. I reserve my comments on him for some other post :)
Heh. There's nothing new about ESR's opposition to the GPL. He's been bad
mouthing Stallman and the GPL for a long time now. And it takes only a
moment to compare their statures and the projects they've been involved in
to decide whom to take seriously.
Face it people, its because of that long haired bearded geek that free
software is what it is today. You may laugh every time he says GNU/Linux
instead of just linux, but if it weren't for him, there'd be no free
software community of significance today to discuss whether it needed the
GPL or not.
--Ayan
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