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Stallman isn't thinking about you or anyone else who reads this forum. He is thinking about the 4 billion disconnected individuals who haven't even entered the

Stallman isn't thinking about you or anyone else who reads this forum. He is thinking about the 4 billion disconnected individuals who haven't even entered the net. Who are we to say that the needs of the developer surpass those of the user. That is not equivalence, and it is sad to continually see developers heed simply because they know where their paycheck comes from. There is more to this world than us enlightened ones.

astrodust 14y ago
For things that should be free, let them be truly free. Do not wall off software from adoption because the GPL prohibits certain kinds of use. Don't discourage people from producing free software by making demands about how and with whom they share their creations. There is a certain kind of software that needs to be free, that shouldn't belong to anyone in particular. This is not all software, and arguably it is not even the majority of it, but it is an important subset. Stallman seems to treat free software as if it were something that was a scarce resource that needs to be protected. This is absurd considering the limitless number of copies of software that can be made. The act of sharing software has benefits to the individual who is sharing. This much has become obvious and will continue to be made clear to others. If licenses like the GPL acted as a catalyst to promote this discovery then they have surved their purpose. That is not to insist they must be refined, become more restrictive, or further hardened against hypothetical aggressors.
- einhverfr 14y ago
  Agreed. The older I get the more I like the BSD licenses.
  - saurik 14y ago
    I am not certain why you bring that up; the obvious context is that one might "grow out of" GPL or some such. To provide an alternative (and equally useless) anecdote, the older I get, the more I prefer GPL licenses (to the extent that I used to be adamant about "freedoms" and such, licensing all of my code as BSD, and then I ran through series of life situations dealing with, as far as I can tell, similar issues to those I hear Stallman had, and now I license everything I do under GPL3: for similar reasons I have come to understand the role of governments, why insurance works the way it does, and in general have become less libertarian); this is a pattern I have seen in others as well: I might argue that the GPL is something you come to later, after you've seen a glimpse of the world of software without it.
    - einhverfr 14y ago
      I don't think it's a matter of growing out of it. Rather when I was younger I tended to uncritically accept the rhetoric surrounding the GPL vs BSD licenses. As I have watched the way many BSD-licensed projects work on the ground, that's changed. Two major realizations have occurred to me: 1) the GPL generally provides a shield to those projects which have a slow pace of development or are immature. They prevent things like Informix or Solaris from developing from PostgreSQL or BSD. 2) On the other hand, as projects mature, there is a real quid quo pro regarding future contributions which doesn't exist in the GPL. By contributing back you ensure you have access to future patches by other contributors. As a result companies like EnterpriseDB or Green Plum which offer proprietary versions of PostgreSQL have both contributed a lot of their code back. They don't contribute everything back but they contribute everything back the project wants to accept. This leaves EDB with some Oracle compatibility code and GreenPlum with a node coordinator and a few other things. The quid quo pro is relatively simple. if the pace of development and quality of code is high, then you really want cost-effective access to new work. The more you keep to yourself the more it costs you to access that work, so you give things back so they become standard, and reduce your own efforts to integrate what is left.
      - saurik 14y ago
        I typed a much longer response, but I realized that the internal contradiction in this argument can be summed up in many fewer words: "...there is a real quid quo pro regarding future contributions which doesn't exist in the GPL. By contributing back you ensure you have access to future patches by other contributors..." <- that is, in fact, a description of the behavior the GPL requires... claiming that it doesn't exist with the GPL thereby is confusing at best. The reason people attempt to avoid the GPL is specifically because they either currently intend to not play "quid pro quo" or because they want to reserve the right to do so in the future.
      - deleted 14y ago
        [deleted]
mseebach 14y ago
> Who are we to say that the needs of the developer surpass those of the user. This is a false dichotomy. The user pays or otherwise rewards the developer because he gets utility from the software. The developer makes software that has utility for users because there's no reward (monetary or otherwise) in making software that isn't useful a user (which could well be the developer himself).
- batgaijin 14y ago
  Your false dichotomy is separating people as users or developers. We are all both, and we should all have the potential to grow as our minds see fit.
  - mseebach 14y ago
    No. As I wrote: (which could well be the developer himself)

astrodust 14y ago

For things that should be free, let them be truly free. Do not wall off software from adoption because the GPL prohibits certain kinds of use. Don't discourage people from producing free software by making demands about how and with whom they share their creations. There is a certain kind of software that needs to be free, that shouldn't belong to anyone in particular. This is not all software, and arguably it is not even the majority of it, but it is an important subset. Stallman seems to treat free software as if it were something that was a scarce resource that needs to be protected. This is absurd considering the limitless number of copies of software that can be made. The act of sharing software has benefits to the individual who is sharing. This much has become obvious and will continue to be made clear to others. If licenses like the GPL acted as a catalyst to promote this discovery then they have surved their purpose. That is not to insist they must be refined, become more restrictive, or further hardened against hypothetical aggressors.

einhverfr 14y ago
Agreed. The older I get the more I like the BSD licenses.
- saurik 14y ago
  I am not certain why you bring that up; the obvious context is that one might "grow out of" GPL or some such. To provide an alternative (and equally useless) anecdote, the older I get, the more I prefer GPL licenses (to the extent that I used to be adamant about "freedoms" and such, licensing all of my code as BSD, and then I ran through series of life situations dealing with, as far as I can tell, similar issues to those I hear Stallman had, and now I license everything I do under GPL3: for similar reasons I have come to understand the role of governments, why insurance works the way it does, and in general have become less libertarian); this is a pattern I have seen in others as well: I might argue that the GPL is something you come to later, after you've seen a glimpse of the world of software without it.
  - einhverfr 14y ago
    I don't think it's a matter of growing out of it. Rather when I was younger I tended to uncritically accept the rhetoric surrounding the GPL vs BSD licenses. As I have watched the way many BSD-licensed projects work on the ground, that's changed. Two major realizations have occurred to me: 1) the GPL generally provides a shield to those projects which have a slow pace of development or are immature. They prevent things like Informix or Solaris from developing from PostgreSQL or BSD. 2) On the other hand, as projects mature, there is a real quid quo pro regarding future contributions which doesn't exist in the GPL. By contributing back you ensure you have access to future patches by other contributors. As a result companies like EnterpriseDB or Green Plum which offer proprietary versions of PostgreSQL have both contributed a lot of their code back. They don't contribute everything back but they contribute everything back the project wants to accept. This leaves EDB with some Oracle compatibility code and GreenPlum with a node coordinator and a few other things. The quid quo pro is relatively simple. if the pace of development and quality of code is high, then you really want cost-effective access to new work. The more you keep to yourself the more it costs you to access that work, so you give things back so they become standard, and reduce your own efforts to integrate what is left.
    - saurik 14y ago
      I typed a much longer response, but I realized that the internal contradiction in this argument can be summed up in many fewer words: "...there is a real quid quo pro regarding future contributions which doesn't exist in the GPL. By contributing back you ensure you have access to future patches by other contributors..." <- that is, in fact, a description of the behavior the GPL requires... claiming that it doesn't exist with the GPL thereby is confusing at best. The reason people attempt to avoid the GPL is specifically because they either currently intend to not play "quid pro quo" or because they want to reserve the right to do so in the future.
    - deleted 14y ago
      [deleted]

mseebach 14y ago

> Who are we to say that the needs of the developer surpass those of the user. This is a false dichotomy. The user pays or otherwise rewards the developer because he gets utility from the software. The developer makes software that has utility for users because there's no reward (monetary or otherwise) in making software that isn't useful a user (which could well be the developer himself).

batgaijin 14y ago
Your false dichotomy is separating people as users or developers. We are all both, and we should all have the potential to grow as our minds see fit.
- mseebach 14y ago
  No. As I wrote: (which could well be the developer himself)