> In the strange world of OccupyGPL, that’s a “restriction”, I guess because it… restricts you from placing restrictions on someone else? But that’s as silly as

> In the strange world of OccupyGPL, that’s a “restriction”, I guess because it… restricts you from placing restrictions on someone else? But that’s as silly as saying that outlawing slavery reduces freedom, because it takes away some people’s freedom to own slaves. Hey, the analogy may be inflammatory, but the logic is the same, and it doesn’t make sense in either case. The freedom to take away others’ freedom is not a meaningful freedom to have — the proper word for that is not “freedom” but “power”. A more pragmatic way to put it is that it restricts you from using the code in the many real-life situations in which GPLing your entire program is simply not an option. The ideology behind the GPL is fundamentally utopian: it starts with a result - that users of software should have the freedoms to use, modify, share, etc. - and reverse engineers the rest of the world from there, including business models that are very different from the way most companies operated at the time of its creation and now, and which are not always practical. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, as it leads to a quite firm and well-defined set of principles, and can serve as a lighthouse for real businesses to try to navigate towards. But it means that individual developers often find themselves in situations where the GNU philosophy is irrelevant - while it's talking about the choice of whether to write free or proprietary software, or this blog post is considering marginal issues like the physical difficulty of distributing source code, they have, for various reasons, already found free software unacceptable as a premise, and are faced with the choice of what software to use. By virtue of their employment or business situation, they are not in the "club", and certain software only available to the "club" is therefore unavailable. From this standpoint, it's easy to see why the GPL feels like a restriction of freedom. Sometimes the premise is more mutable than it originally seems. See "Why CLISP is under GPL"[1] (an email thread barely younger than I am at 22), the old Apple Objective-C thing, and probably a lot of other cases; or look at the case of the Linux kernel, where the utter technical dominance of a GPLed program over all alternatives in certain spaces (particularly embedded) has made a lot of companies who clearly want absolutely nothing to do with free software put up source release webpages. Such examples are often cited as benefits of the copyleft strategy, and rightly so. But for better or worse, they're the exception rather than the rule. [1] http://clisp.cvs.sourceforge.net/viewvc/clisp/clisp/doc/Why-CLISP-is-under-GPL http://clisp.cvs.sourceforge.net/viewvc/clisp/clisp/doc/Why-...