4 ms·

I see all this as a heartwarming story where a company was forced, with a "trap" set by GPL and its philosophy, to offer people for once a square deal: good har

I see all this as a heartwarming story where a company was forced, with a "trap" set by GPL and its philosophy, to offer people for once a square deal: good hardware, fairly priced, you are free to do with it what you want. All this serves human needs better and the manufacturer could in fact turn a profit. There is a faint, faint glimmer of hope that this is a peek of the far future of our techno-political-economic system. Of course with very different laws around intellectual property, company governance, customer protection, terms of participating in the market etc. We might be as far from it as the Enlightenment in 1750 (in a world built on overt serfdom and not even fully developed colonialism) was from the year 2000, but still. Makes me feel a teensy bit better about doing the right thing today, just because.

pjmlp 6y ago
On the other hand this kind of "mistakes" are what is driving the new generation of POSIX clones for IoT untainted by GPL, like Azure RTOS, NuttX, Zephyr, RTOS,...
- MaxBarraclough 6y ago
  Copyleft exists to keep Free Software as Free Software. It doesn't prevent non-Free competitors from existing. If you don't want to be part of the copyleft Free and Open Source software world, then you always have the option to not be a part of it. You can make your own competing product under a non-Free licence, or base your work on Free Software that uses a permissive 'copycenter' licence. This isn't a point against copyleft.
  - pjmlp 6y ago
    I am advocate of dual licensing, GPL + commercial. So who doesn't want to pay can use GPL, who wants to make money can use the commercial license. This clearly doesn't work for companies that like Apple, are now sponsoring POSIX clones for IoT deployments to play safe.
h2odragon 6y ago
See how drones and 3d printers are evolving; who could fund the firmware development? who could fund the research? but now these cutting edge things are necessarily public and cannot both be a military advantage and cutting edge.

pjmlp 6y ago

On the other hand this kind of "mistakes" are what is driving the new generation of POSIX clones for IoT untainted by GPL, like Azure RTOS, NuttX, Zephyr, RTOS,...

MaxBarraclough 6y ago
Copyleft exists to keep Free Software as Free Software. It doesn't prevent non-Free competitors from existing. If you don't want to be part of the copyleft Free and Open Source software world, then you always have the option to not be a part of it. You can make your own competing product under a non-Free licence, or base your work on Free Software that uses a permissive 'copycenter' licence. This isn't a point against copyleft.
- pjmlp 6y ago
  I am advocate of dual licensing, GPL + commercial. So who doesn't want to pay can use GPL, who wants to make money can use the commercial license. This clearly doesn't work for companies that like Apple, are now sponsoring POSIX clones for IoT deployments to play safe.

h2odragon 6y ago

See how drones and 3d printers are evolving; who could fund the firmware development? who could fund the research? but now these cutting edge things are necessarily public and cannot both be a military advantage and cutting edge.