3 ms·

> I feel like I'm in the minority; that people my age and younger who give a shit about things like this, prefer BSD/MIT/Apache style licenses. I am of older a

> I feel like I'm in the minority; that people my age and younger who give a shit about things like this, prefer BSD/MIT/Apache style licenses. I am of older age but I too prefer MIT over GPL. The logic is like this: time is precious and if I devote it to developing an open-source library, I want it to be used by as many people as possible. I see no reason whatsoever why I would exclude closed-source software from adopting it.

quadrangle 8y ago
You may not care enough, but at least you could see a reason: to assure that those who use your work respect the freedom of their users. You could even disagree with prioritizing this. But it's not like there's no reason to be seen. There are cases where someone wants to build something with your work, period. And if you require that it stay free software, it will be free for the end-users where it wouldn't be otherwise.
- greyman 8y ago
  But I don't recognize that definition of "freedom of their users". It's an artificial construct made by RMS. There are various reasons why some people or companies don't open their source code. That choice should be respected. I also write a lot of closed source, because it was decided the source should be closed.
  - quadrangle 8y ago
    If you want to disagree with the value, that's one thing. Not being able to recognize it is an intellectual failing (literally re-cognize, i.e. understand a concept, whether or not you think it's valid or important). Let me help you out: if I have a computer and there exists software that I could privately run for my own purposes and the computer is set up to not allow me to run that software I want to run, then I am lacking some freedom to use my own computer fully. Or say I want to copy some software from one computer to another but someone has legally or technically put barriers to my ability to do that. These are not an artificial constructs, they are as plain as any concept of freedom can be.
tormeh 8y ago
Then why not use LGPL? It seems like the perfect compromise.

quadrangle 8y ago

You may not care enough, but at least you could see a reason: to assure that those who use your work respect the freedom of their users. You could even disagree with prioritizing this. But it's not like there's no reason to be seen. There are cases where someone wants to build something with your work, period. And if you require that it stay free software, it will be free for the end-users where it wouldn't be otherwise.

greyman 8y ago
But I don't recognize that definition of "freedom of their users". It's an artificial construct made by RMS. There are various reasons why some people or companies don't open their source code. That choice should be respected. I also write a lot of closed source, because it was decided the source should be closed.
- quadrangle 8y ago
  If you want to disagree with the value, that's one thing. Not being able to recognize it is an intellectual failing (literally re-cognize, i.e. understand a concept, whether or not you think it's valid or important). Let me help you out: if I have a computer and there exists software that I could privately run for my own purposes and the computer is set up to not allow me to run that software I want to run, then I am lacking some freedom to use my own computer fully. Or say I want to copy some software from one computer to another but someone has legally or technically put barriers to my ability to do that. These are not an artificial constructs, they are as plain as any concept of freedom can be.

tormeh 8y ago

Then why not use LGPL? It seems like the perfect compromise.