3 ms·

>The GPL forces people to look away, to keep shopping for solutions or to write their own. The GPLed solution which could have made their life easier is on the

>The GPL forces people to look away, to keep shopping for solutions or to write their own. The GPLed solution which could have made their life easier is on the wrong side of an event horizon which prevents them from taking advantage and causes a problem (many problems!) to be solved more than once, because they don't wish to go there and stay there. That "event horizon" you're talking about is one that stops people from taking code that already exists, building on it to solve more problems, and... not letting anyone else use it. I, too, believe that no problem should need to be solved more than once. The GPL is in part a tool to help ensure that.

dbtx 7y ago
I know that's the reasoning behind it. My problem is that it's still selfish, just a different flavor of selfishness from EULAs, and maybe falls under a different sense of the word protectionism... well, I can't quickly come up with a better one. It's all rather Western and not as noble as I used to think. I want to give everyone all the same freedoms that the GPL guarantees, and I want to include freedom from the GPL. I don't want to be afraid of wrong people doing wrong things so that I'd be spending time and energy trying to stop them, especially not if it interferes with doing useful things for anyone. The Sqlite blessing is really neat.
- ryukafalz 7y ago
  I think... ideally, the GPL wouldn't be necessary, we'd have a strong software commons, and people wouldn't take advantage of it to exploit the rest of us. That's not the world we live in, though, and I see the GPL as an attempt to bootstrap a commons in a world that cares for profit above nearly anything else. Is it selfish? Perhaps, in a way. I'm sure there are some who genuinely value the freedoms granted by more permissive licenses for their own sake, and who are principled enough to never take advantage of that and lock up the results. You may be one of them, and I can respect that position. I'm willing to bet most of those who strongly avoid the GPL are not.

dbtx 7y ago

I know that's the reasoning behind it. My problem is that it's still selfish, just a different flavor of selfishness from EULAs, and maybe falls under a different sense of the word protectionism... well, I can't quickly come up with a better one. It's all rather Western and not as noble as I used to think. I want to give everyone all the same freedoms that the GPL guarantees, and I want to include freedom from the GPL. I don't want to be afraid of wrong people doing wrong things so that I'd be spending time and energy trying to stop them, especially not if it interferes with doing useful things for anyone. The Sqlite blessing is really neat.

ryukafalz 7y ago
I think... ideally, the GPL wouldn't be necessary, we'd have a strong software commons, and people wouldn't take advantage of it to exploit the rest of us. That's not the world we live in, though, and I see the GPL as an attempt to bootstrap a commons in a world that cares for profit above nearly anything else. Is it selfish? Perhaps, in a way. I'm sure there are some who genuinely value the freedoms granted by more permissive licenses for their own sake, and who are principled enough to never take advantage of that and lock up the results. You may be one of them, and I can respect that position. I'm willing to bet most of those who strongly avoid the GPL are not.