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>> The GPL is a legal tactic of the FSF movement, who believe that intellectual property in software is immoral > This is not correct. Well, it is basically c
by cschwarm 17y ago
>> The GPL is a legal tactic of the FSF movement, who believe that intellectual property in software is immoral
> This is not correct.
Well, it is basically correct. The core idea of the Free Software movement is that all software should be free. They believe that software not fitting their subjective definition of "free" is immoral (or evil).
This has been declared quite a few times by Richard Stallman; for example, here:
“The free software movement aims for a social change: to make all software free so that all software users are free […]. Every non-free program gives its developer unjust power over the users. Our goal is to put an end to that injustice.” -- http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/compromise.html http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/compromise.html
I admit, the word "intellectual property" was an unlucky choice by the previous poster.
- jmillikin 17y agoYou must be using some definition for "correct" of which I was previously unaware. The FSF opposes the term "intellectual property" because it is vague and confuses several unrelated areas of law. However, I have never heard them argue against copyright, trademark, or patents -- only specific, poorly-considered applications of these such as patents on equations. Furthermore, the only way to have capital-F Free software requires strong copyright protection. In a world without copyright, Free software would be impossible because there would be no laws to prevent distribution without the source code.