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It's the only way to avoid large companies turning it into their own projects and selling that for a large markup, with very little benefit to the taxpayer and
by Avamander 6y ago
It's the only way to avoid large companies turning it into their own projects and selling that for a large markup, with very little benefit to the taxpayer and some extra user freedom infringement sprinkled on top.
Even something like LGPL allows taking freedoms from users and it could be blatantly seen from the Polish eDowod software issue (that's still ongoing).
- dzhiurgis 6y agoBy selling those they are becoming a tax payer. You are basically arguing that there's limited amount of pie and we can't create more...
- Avamander 6y ago> By selling those they are becoming a tax payer. Given the massive amount of tax-evasion there are doubts about that. And I'm not arguing that there's limited amount of pie. I'm arguing that it's not okay to make people pay for pie, lace it with cardboard and ask them to pay for it again.
- pabs3 6y agoThe GPL doesn't prevent large companies from selling software. Mobile phone vendors sell Linux based Android devices all the time and Linux is GPL.
- RealStickman_ 6y agoAndroid is open source though.
- kube-system 6y agoI paid $24.99 for my first copy of Linux. Bought it on the shelf at Walmart, actually.
- RealStickman_ 6y agoDoes the GPL prevent someone from making money? I think it only forces everyone to publish their source code.
- MaxBarraclough 6y agoRoughly speaking that's correct. The GPL isn't hostile to paid means of distributing a program, but it's hostile to distributing binaries while deliberately obstructing access to source-code. [0] An aside in the interests of precision: the GPL doesn't force 'everyone' to publish their source. If your fork is private and is never distributed at all, you aren't obligated to make your source-code available, and you don't even need to tell anyone you have your own fork. The Affero GPL licence differs from the standard GPL, on this point. [0] https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#DoesTheGPLAllowMoney https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#DoesTheGPLAllowMon...
- pabs3 6y agoThe GPL doesn't force publication of source code, just distribution of source to the folks you distribute binaries to.
- Avamander 6y agoLarge parts of it that make it usable on modern devices are proprietary or weakly-licensed. There even isn't a way to sideload Android on a lot of the devices it runs on because of that.
- Avamander 6y agoOh it absolutely does, it's like kryptonite to companies that want to keep everything theirs a secret. It's a secondary effect, but it's there.