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> The GPL is a fine open source license that grants all the permissions needed by developer communities that adopt it. There is no sense in which it is not "per
by sgentle 9y ago
> The GPL is a fine open source license that grants all the permissions needed by developer communities that adopt it. There is no sense in which it is not "permissive", so to use that term as an antonym to "copyleft" verges on abuse.
Sigh. This attitude makes it enormously difficult to have any kind of conversation about the tradeoffs of open source licenses, because it reveals a profound lack of perspective or willingness to admit that even your darling license isn't perfect.
Can we not just accept that there are two different attitudes towards freedom? One says that true freedom being able to do whatever you want, the other says true freedom is restricting others from infringing on your freedom (and being thus restricted in turn).
This is anarchism vs libertarianism, Jon Stewart vs Bill Maher liberalism, and non-interventionism vs neoconservatism. Do you preserve freedom even if you need to do it by causing unfreedom? It's a question that has resisted all attempts to find a simple answer despite generations of attempts.
It could be that all these people just need to read the GPL to find out that there's no sense in which being required to do something is not permissive. Or perhaps a little humility is in order, and we could make the effort the understand that different ideologies can, if not agree, at least respect each other.
- dleslie 9y agoAn anarchist ought not care what the license terms are; they are already operating in an ethical framework that revokes concern for a collection of words that rely on state violence to have meaning.
- sounds 9y agoCool! A discussion where the anarchists are represented clearly! Do I understand libertarianism the way sgentle does? He compares anarchism:libertarianism::permissive license:GPL, so I guess he's using libertarianism in the sense of "absolute minimum amount of government necessary to enforce property rights." As to whether you preserve freedom best by causing "unfreedoms," philosophy already has some pretty useful things to say, such as ue_'s comment: Hegel ... described the freedom of the savage being a kind of unrefined freedom Some freedoms are conflicting by their very definition. Resolving the conflict is at its core the imposition of an ordering over the set of all freedoms, or in other words, a value system. Almost all the discussion on this article can be reduced to a comparison of well known value systems and attempts to sway readers to one or another.
- placeybordeaux 9y agoDepends on if you are being pragmatic or not. Even if you don't believe that the state should enforce it's will on you over the license of the code you are using, it will try.
- nimih 9y agoAn anarchist could very well see using a license as a political act: disagreeing with the existence of an institution doesn't prevent you from using the levers of power provided by that institution to achieve a given end.
- tanderson92 9y agoI'm curious, can you expand on how you see the Stewart vs. Maher analogy in this case? full disclaimer: I love Stewart and think Maher is a smug prick, while being far to the left of both of them.