GPL vs The World
With the recent debacle over whether or not the ASF license is compatible with the GPL license, Leo Simmons discusses the arrogance of the FSF and concludes with:
So I might as well stick to the MIT license. But the arrogance of the FSF makes me feel very much like giving them the finger and just going with the ASL.
Personally I agree. I’ve never liked the GPL as a license, it’s just way too restrictive to be considered “free software”. It’s open software, but not truly free. The Free Software Foundation has redefined the term “free” to suit their purposes, but it’s hard to argue that truly free software is in the public domain. You can literally do anything you want with it without every having to worry about copyright law. The GPL however, uses copyright law specifically to restrict what you can do with the software. Yes, it’s less restrictive the what copyright law allows by default, but that doesn’t mean it’s not restrictive.
It particularly annoys me that the FSF feel the need to try and force everyone to use the GPL instead of picking the license that provides the terms they provide. Many people may want to see commercial software using their code - it helps to spread good ideas and opens up job opportunities for them. Personally I think it’s great when companies use code I’ve released, it’s not like I had plans to use the code to make a profit or I wouldn’t have open sourced it in the first place.
The other thing that gets me (as Leo pointed out) is that the GPL isn’t compatible with anything yet the FSF expects every other license to be compatible with it. The day I can use GPL code in my ASL licensed projects is the day I give a damn whether or not people can use my ASL code in GPL projects. In the mean time, everyone except those silly enough to use the GPL can quite happily use my code - in open source or commercial work.
February 20th, 2004 at 9:48 pm
GPL and ASF licenses
Other people in a apache land are unhappy with the current FSF stance on the Apache License. Even though the new license was written to be compatible, the FSF dont like it, and still say ’stop using Apache’. I think…
February 20th, 2004 at 11:17 pm
Well said!
February 21st, 2004 at 8:45 am
Interesting opinion, but harmed by some bugs in the basic ideas. For example, “open source” and “commercial” are not opposites, unless you have some particularly strange definition that you use.
Anyway, I think the reason that ASL-1 fans have problems with GPL is because it prevents addition of further conditions and most ASL-1 fans seem to like adding their own “Your announcement must praise ME!” condition to the permission grant. Their position is a lot weaker than FreeBSD fans.
Personally, I’m more concerned that people will misapply ASL-2.0 by claiming that something like “Ode to my goldfish” in the NOTICE file is an attribution notice. The patent termination stuff does seem close to the borderline, though.
February 24th, 2004 at 11:29 am
Free Software Fascism
Leo Simmons urges you to “not use the GPL or LGPL for software you write”. He gives some reasonable justification for his policy. Not sure I agree, but he has his reasons. One of the comments below his post is the funniest thing I’ve read in a long tim…