February 2012
16 posts
Why Anti-Authoritarians are Diagnosed as Mentally... →
“Thus, DirectX was born. 3D accelerators were born a few months later. And...”
– linux - Why do game developers prefer Windows? - Programmers - Stack Exchange
Missing Foundations | Common Dreams →
Teller Reveals His Secrets | Arts & Culture |... →
Rod Serling at Moorpark College in 1968 →
News from The Associated Press →
Archived-Articles: The AGW Smoking Gun →
Lemon art. Almost looks like a fractal. - Imgur →
English plainclothes police officer follows... →
Why economic inequality leads to collapse |... →
Courthouse News Service →
Truth, lies and Afghanistan - February 2012 -... →
Truth, lies and Afghanistan - February 2012 -... →
Sigh. This is a "why haven't you let Jesus into your life" question. If I answer it in public, FSF zealots will jump out of the woodwork and pester me incessantly to recant and confess. Eh, screw it. I'm taking the "no replying to bruce" thing to mean _all_ FSF zealots, and not replying to them. Back when GPLv3 came out there was a giant linux kernel thread about this topic, and a position statement: http://lwn.net/Articles/200422/ But long before GPLv3 shipped, Linus said he wasn't gonna, and to most of us Linux developers GPL was "the linux kernel license". Nobody cared what the FSF said, and some people collected Linus's public statements on that: http://yarchive.net/comp/linux/gpl.html Then when GPLv3 happened we all looked over it and went "you're crazy, you know that?" And the FSF went "you'll come around. You have no choice. Bwahahahaha." I'm pretty sure I participated in that thread at the time, a quick Google finds the tip of an iceberg:
https: //lkml.org/lkml/2007/6/14/567
http: //lkml.indiana.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0706.1/287... But there was more. Oh so much more. The FSF zealots WOULD NOT SHUT UP ABOUT IT, no matter how many different ways we said "no"... I've blogged about it too, intermittently over the years:
http: //landley.net/notes-2006.html#03-12-2006
http: //landley.net/notes-2009.html#02-03-2009 In a nutshell it wasn't needed, is far more complicated, tries to control how the code is USED on the target and not just how it's distributed... Ok, let's go back to the elephant in the room: the FSF had really bad advocates try to cram it down our throats until we went "death first" and stuck our fingers in our ears until they got bored and went away. (Really, the flamewar on the mailing list lasted MONTHS. If you're wondering why "sue them until they see things our way" and "just wait, they'll come around" don't seem like viable tactics to most of the Linux crowd, it's because we've been on the receiving end of them, and didn't like it.) We do have actual technical reasons. Specifically in the embedded space, the _easy_ way to comply with GPLv3 ("If you can upgrade it, I must be able to, so give me the root password to the world of warcraft server I have an account on") is to cut the jtag traces on the board and burn your code into ROM, so the vendor can't upgrade it either. Is this really something we want to _encourage_? GPLv2 had 17 years of analysis when GPLv3 shipped, and nobody ever found anything _wrong_ with it. The busybox suits are still enforcing GPLv2, not v3. The FSF went "I am altering the bargain, pray I don't alter it any further", and the rest of us cried "foul". We don't trust the FSF, it keeps pulling dirty tricks to try to get its way: http://landley.net/notes-2011.html#15-08-2011 I preferred GPLv2 over GPLv3 for a number of reasons, but I don't want to CONSIDER using GPLv3 because I don't want to get any of the FSF on me. They're crazy, and far more interested in persecuting heretics than heathens. Rob
Posted Feb 1, 2012 1: 38 UTC (Wed) by BrucePerens (subscriber, #2510) [Link]
If you are OK with corporations doing whatever they want with your code and never returning anything, you will prefer BSD over GPL. If you think Tivo-ization is OK, you will prefer GPL2 to GPL3. If you think running Free Software inside of Google and never providing the source code (because it's never distributed) is OK, you will prefer the GPL class of licenses over the Affero GPL class. Making free software, for me, was about empowering people, not giving welfare to the world's richest corporations. So, these days I put Affero GPL3 on my software, and I offer a commercial license for $$$ to folks who don't like that. Some would have you believe that I am crazy or evil or trying to compel people to do something against their will, or some religious zealot. But I see this as economics rather than politics or religion. I have chosen the economic structure that helps people who want to share most effectively, and lets people who don't want to share pay for the privilege and help to develop more software that is shared.
“I’ve never been a “job creator.” I can start a business based...”
– OpEdNews - Article: Inequality, the Middle Class, and Growth
January 2012
29 posts
SpaceShipOne man, Nobel boffins: DON'T PANIC on... →
FOCUS: Banks Taketh, but Don't Giveth →
“If American copyright laws can be enforced around the world, why can’t...”
– reddit: the front page of the internet
Productivity and the Workweek - shorter hours →
“Frontier Foundation’s Marcia Hoffman has commentary on the disappointing...”
– What decryption orders mean for the Fifth Amendment - Boing Boing
Non-Copied Photo Is Ruled Copyright Infringement -... →
The Excavator: NDAA Is Washington's Totalitarian... →
“Next week will mark the third anniversary of Barack Obama’s inauguration,...”
– Black America Paralyzed, Powerless, Irrelevant: Year 4 of the Obama Era | Black Agenda Report
“a”
– Inside the Fed in 2006: A Coming Crisis, and Banter - Yahoo! Finance
Austan Goolsbee: Unemployment Is 'Going To Stay... →
Occupy Pushes Back Against Protest Ordinance As... →
OpEdNews - Article: The Overlooked Factor in... →
Obama Prepared to Use Force to Stop Nuclear Iran,... →
“Pushing things to last minute/breaking point is power control device for those...”
– OpEdNews - Article: Trouble in the Homeless Home of Occupy Wall Street
“A review of a $550 million pool of mortgages booked by WMC and another subprime...”
– Fraud and Folly: The Untold Story of General Electric’s Subprime Debacle | Economy | AlterNet
Newt Distorts Food Stamp Facts to Demonize the... →
Have the Super-Rich Seceded From the United... →
CWC Texts : Recent Features : Nightmares of... →
Why Freemium Doesn't Work - Slashdot →
“I have a long-term experience to relate. I’m already in an area that...”
– Why Freemium Doesn’t Work - Slashdot
Gerald Celente Telling It Like It Is: MF Global,... →
“Did you play with the rule were if you land on free parking, you collect the...”
– Monopoly is an Old Game : funny
30 Statistics That Show That The Middle Class Is... →
Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Online... →
Hullabaloo →
An adviser to Margaret Thatcher explains, in carefully and cautiously couched terms, the real reason for the conservative emphasis on austerity (h/t Tom Sullivan):
News from The Associated Press →
December 2011
64 posts
“Yes, I’m willing to continue to have Muslim children slaughtered by covert...”
– Glenn Greenwald: Progressives and the Ron Paul fallacies : politics
WTF? (What the Fawkes?) | Privacy SOS →