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> I'm assuming the Fuchsia development is 100% about not having to use any GPL software. This. Everyone wants to distance themselves from the GPL. The reality

> I'm assuming the Fuchsia development is 100% about not having to use any GPL software. This. Everyone wants to distance themselves from the GPL. The reality is that the ideas the 90s open source movements were founded on are far from what we see today. We don't see OSS end user applications; at least not a lot in mainstream use. Instead, we just see OSS middleware. In the early 2000s, people though one day we'd see Gimp be on par with Photoshop and StarOffice/Libreoffice take on Word and Excel. We've come a long way, but those ideas were never realized.

zzzcpan 9y ago
And by everyone you mean Google and other corporations, that explicitly disallow software with restrictive licenses, because opening up their own software, giving up lock in and actually competing is unthinkable to them. So not really about distancing themselves or the movement. Individual developers and small companies, on the other hand, can benefit from the most restrictive GPL licenses by selling commercial licenses to those corporations and not giving it away for free to them.
wiz21c 9y ago
>>> the ideas the 90s open source movements were founded on are far from what we see today Are they ? GPL is about protecting users' freedom. It's still a valid aim to me, probably even more so. What has changed is that the web is much bigger than the desktop and so the GPL has less ground to grow on, so its effect may have been weakened. But only the effect, not the goal. (I 100% admit I am more an idealist than a pragmatic)
- Nomentatus 9y ago
  By users' freedom you don't mean users who own patents, since they stand to lose their property under GPL restrictions. (Google Implied Patent Grant if that doesn't ring a bell.) So most important corporations, etc. Copyleft was a very clever idea; but deciding to go to war against all intellectual property was a step too far. Immense billions have been spent already replacing GPL software with truly free software under a freer, more liberal license.
littlestymaar 9y ago
The software companies learned that they could benefit from open-source and collaboration on the infrastructural blocks and they eventually embraced it, which led to an increasing number of open-source project. But they don't like the GPL, which is a political instrument created by the Free software activists. But those activists still exist, and their code is still written in GPL to avoid being “weaponized” by big corporations. The main difference is that they don't need to write all the tools they need on their own, since private corporations now release open-source code. And because of that, it's easier than ever to run with almost 100% free software on your desktop. These people never _thought_ “StarOffice/Libreoffice take on Word and Excel”, they _wished_ there would be a political movement that make it happen, like socialists wish the Revolution occurs. And in the 90ies − early 2000s it really looked impossible, because the technical challenge was too big: everything had to be built from scratch to compete with a relentless private industry that kept moving forward: even the _programming language_ and the build tools were proprietary. RMS wanted to write a free printer driver, and first he had to the whole GNU stuff, with GCC and Emacs! If you look where we are now, you can see it's way better ;).

zzzcpan 9y ago

And by everyone you mean Google and other corporations, that explicitly disallow software with restrictive licenses, because opening up their own software, giving up lock in and actually competing is unthinkable to them. So not really about distancing themselves or the movement. Individual developers and small companies, on the other hand, can benefit from the most restrictive GPL licenses by selling commercial licenses to those corporations and not giving it away for free to them.

wiz21c 9y ago

>>> the ideas the 90s open source movements were founded on are far from what we see today Are they ? GPL is about protecting users' freedom. It's still a valid aim to me, probably even more so. What has changed is that the web is much bigger than the desktop and so the GPL has less ground to grow on, so its effect may have been weakened. But only the effect, not the goal. (I 100% admit I am more an idealist than a pragmatic)

Nomentatus 9y ago
By users' freedom you don't mean users who own patents, since they stand to lose their property under GPL restrictions. (Google Implied Patent Grant if that doesn't ring a bell.) So most important corporations, etc. Copyleft was a very clever idea; but deciding to go to war against all intellectual property was a step too far. Immense billions have been spent already replacing GPL software with truly free software under a freer, more liberal license.

littlestymaar 9y ago

The software companies learned that they could benefit from open-source and collaboration on the infrastructural blocks and they eventually embraced it, which led to an increasing number of open-source project. But they don't like the GPL, which is a political instrument created by the Free software activists. But those activists still exist, and their code is still written in GPL to avoid being “weaponized” by big corporations. The main difference is that they don't need to write all the tools they need on their own, since private corporations now release open-source code. And because of that, it's easier than ever to run with almost 100% free software on your desktop. These people never _thought_ “StarOffice/Libreoffice take on Word and Excel”, they _wished_ there would be a political movement that make it happen, like socialists wish the Revolution occurs. And in the 90ies − early 2000s it really looked impossible, because the technical challenge was too big: everything had to be built from scratch to compete with a relentless private industry that kept moving forward: even the _programming language_ and the build tools were proprietary. RMS wanted to write a free printer driver, and first he had to the whole GNU stuff, with GCC and Emacs! If you look where we are now, you can see it's way better ;).