4 ms·

Stallman, who effectively think it's immoral to make money off selling the software itself This is just lazy. Stallman's position has literally nothing to do w

by naner 15y ago

Stallman, who effectively think it's immoral to make money off selling the software itself This is just lazy. Stallman's position has literally nothing to do with money. Also I don't really understand the rest of your post: Linux and the GNU tools are clones, especially the GNU tools. And free software commoditizing certain classes of software is a good thing since we don't have to reinvent the wheel a billion times. Without free software "clones" it would have been massively difficult for products like OSX to even exist. There are still "commercial" programming languages being created (off the top of my head: F# and Q) and I'm having a hard time coming up with any commercial language whose success was damaged by free software clones. Can you give any concrete examples here? LibreOffice is still crap compared to (also kind of crappy) the MS Office Suite. If we all had to pay for IIS and SQL server the web would be much much smaller. Where is the damage being done?

econgeeker 15y ago
I believe under the GPL, you can sell software, you just have to distribute the source, that's true. However, the message hasn't seemingly sunk in, as there are many people who seem to be followers of stallman who get up in arms any time someone sells open source software (even if they are distributing the source.) It is apparently offline now, but there used to be a huge list here: http://ffmpeg.org/shame.html http://ffmpeg.org/shame.html I picked some at random awhile back and looked into them. Every single "shame" was a commercial company that was complying with the GPL, and was distributing source code to ffmpeg. (Running it as a separate process, not mixing the code.) This didn't matter to them. They documented constantly harassing these companies, who would try to comply with their demands (most of which were not required by the GPL) and then would give up, because the demands would just escalate. It was kinda like software terrorism-- harassing people for selling software that included -- sometimes as a small part-- open source code.

by naner 15y ago

econgeeker 15y ago

I believe under the GPL, you can sell software, you just have to distribute the source, that's true. However, the message hasn't seemingly sunk in, as there are many people who seem to be followers of stallman who get up in arms any time someone sells open source software (even if they are distributing the source.) It is apparently offline now, but there used to be a huge list here: http://ffmpeg.org/shame.html http://ffmpeg.org/shame.html I picked some at random awhile back and looked into them. Every single "shame" was a commercial company that was complying with the GPL, and was distributing source code to ffmpeg. (Running it as a separate process, not mixing the code.) This didn't matter to them. They documented constantly harassing these companies, who would try to comply with their demands (most of which were not required by the GPL) and then would give up, because the demands would just escalate. It was kinda like software terrorism-- harassing people for selling software that included -- sometimes as a small part-- open source code.