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RMS Talk on The Free Software Movement

• lupin_sansei 19y ago
  This is going to be unpopular, but it irks me that people say that GPLd software (not LGPL) is free as in speech (liberty). It's a little less free than speech, since I can't take GPLd code and combine it with my proprietary code. I understand why people might not want me to do this, but then you can't very well say I have liberty to use that code. It's limited freedom. Don't get me wrong, I love GPL software, it's just not the last word in freedom. I can imagine freer software, LGPL or the Perl Artistic license for instance. Infact I wonder why free software needs a license at all? The ultimate freedom would be source you can do whatever you want with. With no license to tell you what you can or can't do with it.
  • dfranke 19y ago
    You do need a license of some sort. BSD, MIT, and similar are about as minimal as is advisable. You need a disclaimer of warranty so that you're not liable if your software breaks someone's system, and the user's right to use your software needs to be conditional upon accepting the disclaimer.
  • lkozma 19y ago
    You need these restrictions in order to protect your freedom. If GPL would allow combining code in proprietary code, someone could take your GPL-code, build a product out of it, release it under a proprietary license, then sue you for infringing his license.
    • lupin_sansei 19y ago
      If this was true wouldn't people releasing code under other licenses such as the LGPL be getting sued now?