I fear that you, as well as a large portion of the HN community, are prematurely marking GPL software and the GNU movement as an outdated idea that has less of

I fear that you, as well as a large portion of the HN community, are prematurely marking GPL software and the GNU movement as an outdated idea that has less of a place moving forward. You look at society today and say, "well, tech has moved so much in the past 25 years, and it's far too developed to become closed now. The point has been made." That's bullshit. We live in a far more closed world than we ever have before. Most people (eg: those not on this website) use their phone as their primary computing device. They access software primarily through closed source app stores. They give their information to servers which are almost certainly closed source. This industry is far too young; the war on general computing is far too powerful, to be able to have this opinion and think it does no harm. We have seen all the good that the GPL has done for us, and we've seen the damage that BSD licensing can do. I'm not saying that BSD licensing doesn't have a place, (I actually use OpenBSD on a daily basis, and I'm aware of many of the difficulties that they face with regards to GPL'd stuff [1]), I'm only saying that it is not superior to the GPL in all cases. [1]: http://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=20070901041657 http://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=20070901041657