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The flip side of the story is that having RMS pushing for copy left software relentlessly means you have an free OS + kernel and free development tools that can

by pavanky 13y ago

The flip side of the story is that having RMS pushing for copy left software relentlessly means you have an free OS + kernel and free development tools that can run on practically any given device. APPLE is one of the few companies that refuses to use GPL because they are staunchly anti copy left. There are many companies out there that feel otherwise. Before I get too far off the road, the point I am trying to make is that the business models ARE changing back to be more free. They changed in the first place from free to proprietary in the late 70s.

nzp 13y ago
We have a free OS + kernel (and mind you, GNU/Linux is not the only viable free software OS) because RMS hacked relentlessly in the 80's on GCC and other C toolchain components. In fact, so relentlessly it destroyed his hands with RSI. No amount of political pushing for copyleft would have made any difference if the code wasn't there. I'd rate GCC as by far the most important enabler of the abundance of free software we have today, and for that I'm deeply grateful to RMS. I'm fairly certain that no company chose GPL because the management's first concern was joining FSF's struggle against proprietary software. Businesses can't operate that way. Whether a company adopts GPL or not depends on perceived business benefits of adoption. So the question of this or that company adopting GPL or not doesn't have anything to do with moral reasoning behind GPL and is therefore irrelevant to what we're talking about. Yes, they're changing, in the same way that a factory may change when it adopts new machinery. Companies who adopt copyleft adopt it because of the "open source" philosophy, not because of the "free software" philosophy. This is actually one of Stallman's talking points (open source vs. free software) I'm very sympathetic to.
mwfunk 13y ago
Apple is clearly anti-GPL3, which is not the same thing as being "staunchly anti copy left". They ship a number of GPL2 components, some of which were essentially forked when the upstream project moved to GPL3. Your last comment has been made a gazillion times over the last 20+ years but it's just not that simple. There was no time in which the default business model for software was free. What there was, was a time in which there was no mass-market business model for software, period. There was no such thing as a store you could walk into and buy software prior to the mid-'70s, and a much larger proportion of software developers were scientists, engineers, and hobbyists, who passed around a lot of common code, as they still do today. It's not like there was some golden utopia back in 1973 where the world's #1 spreadsheet application was free software, because such things didn't exist back then.
rsynnott 13y ago
> APPLE is one of the few companies that refuses to use GPL because they are staunchly anti copy left. Hrm? I think a lot of companies are pretty wary of GPLv3. And even GPL in general, really; look at Android. About the only remaining GPL component is the Linux kernel (and that's GPLv2, of course). Only major corporate adoption of GPLv3 I can think if is some Oracle dual-licensed GPL/commercial stuff. EDIT: It's worth noting, of course, that Apple does still use GPL stuff, just not GPLv3 stuff.

by pavanky 13y ago

nzp 13y ago

We have a free OS + kernel (and mind you, GNU/Linux is not the only viable free software OS) because RMS hacked relentlessly in the 80's on GCC and other C toolchain components. In fact, so relentlessly it destroyed his hands with RSI. No amount of political pushing for copyleft would have made any difference if the code wasn't there. I'd rate GCC as by far the most important enabler of the abundance of free software we have today, and for that I'm deeply grateful to RMS. I'm fairly certain that no company chose GPL because the management's first concern was joining FSF's struggle against proprietary software. Businesses can't operate that way. Whether a company adopts GPL or not depends on perceived business benefits of adoption. So the question of this or that company adopting GPL or not doesn't have anything to do with moral reasoning behind GPL and is therefore irrelevant to what we're talking about. Yes, they're changing, in the same way that a factory may change when it adopts new machinery. Companies who adopt copyleft adopt it because of the "open source" philosophy, not because of the "free software" philosophy. This is actually one of Stallman's talking points (open source vs. free software) I'm very sympathetic to.

mwfunk 13y ago

Apple is clearly anti-GPL3, which is not the same thing as being "staunchly anti copy left". They ship a number of GPL2 components, some of which were essentially forked when the upstream project moved to GPL3. Your last comment has been made a gazillion times over the last 20+ years but it's just not that simple. There was no time in which the default business model for software was free. What there was, was a time in which there was no mass-market business model for software, period. There was no such thing as a store you could walk into and buy software prior to the mid-'70s, and a much larger proportion of software developers were scientists, engineers, and hobbyists, who passed around a lot of common code, as they still do today. It's not like there was some golden utopia back in 1973 where the world's #1 spreadsheet application was free software, because such things didn't exist back then.

rsynnott 13y ago

> APPLE is one of the few companies that refuses to use GPL because they are staunchly anti copy left. Hrm? I think a lot of companies are pretty wary of GPLv3. And even GPL in general, really; look at Android. About the only remaining GPL component is the Linux kernel (and that's GPLv2, of course). Only major corporate adoption of GPLv3 I can think if is some Oracle dual-licensed GPL/commercial stuff. EDIT: It's worth noting, of course, that Apple does still use GPL stuff, just not GPLv3 stuff.