4 ms·
Big corporations led by big egos have the power to kill products and permanently remove innovations from the market They also have money to sponsor developme
by rimantas 16y ago
Big corporations led by big egos have the power to kill
products and permanently remove innovations from the market
They also have money to sponsor development: Sun (R.I.P.) and JRuby, Apple and LLVM/Webkit/CUPS, Google and Android, and many more.
- rbanffy 16y agoAnd that's why the GPL (and its derivatives/workalikes) is important - because it prevents any company or individual from taking away the freedoms of the users downstream.
- rimantas 16y agoNot all projects I mentioned are under GPL and some chose non-GPL license specifically to give more freedom than GPL and likes allow.
- rbanffy 16y agoLike I said, the only added freedom you enjoy by having MIT/BSD-ish rather than GPL is the freedom to remove freedoms downstream. And the ones that are not GPL are so precisely because the vendor wants to be able to remove freedoms downstream should the need or opportunity arise. Are you aware of any other freedom I don't know about?
- rimantas 16y agoYes. To allow "downstream" to do whatever they want with a piece of code I gave them being free from my command what to do.
- rbanffy 16y agoIncluding denying its users any freedom. Tell me one freedom that does not involve denying freedoms and I'll give you the point. If, however, the only freedom you want is the one to deny freedoms, then, this argument became circular a couple messages back. Using the GPL you deny no other freedom to your downstream users that that.
- alextgordon 16y agoYes. Including denying its users any freedom. "Freedom" is not black and white. Sometimes you need to deny users one freedom in order to give them another. For example, Spotify is a non-free application and it has DRM and lock-in and nasty things like that (no doubt required by the music industry). However, it's completely changed the way I listen to music and given me freedom to listen to more music than I could have done before. I have essentially traded the freedom to tinker for the freedom to listen to music.
- rbanffy 16y agoActually, you traded your freedom to tinker for your ability to play whatever they chose to offer you. I hope you like their offering.