Rchard Stallman vs Darl McBride

[Jon Jensen]

On Tue, 20 Jul 2010, Levi Pearson wrote:

>> In other words, I don't see the more liberal licenses such as BSD or 
>> MIT being on any higher moral ground, or freer, than the GPL. They just 
>> have different tradeoffs.
>
> Except that 'more liberal' literally means more free. :)

Yes, the BSD and MIT licenses are more liberal about what they allow the 
end user to do.

But the GPL is counterintuitively more liberal about what it gives the 
community, using copyright law in a nontraditional way.

If the law itself were more liberal, there'd be no need for either.

> I get your point, though, and that's what I said at the beginning of 
> this.  I don't care for the social movement surrounding the GPL, and I 
> would rather attend a presentation on technical topics than on Free 
> Software evangelism.

Sure. Point taken.

I think many of us see value in discussing the freedom aspect of the free 
software movement, and consider it irresponsible not to expose newcomers 
to the community about it. Many of us have been on this list for a very 
long time, and to us the topics are well-worn and mostly understood 
(though not entirely, as tonight's discussion shows). But to newcomers, 
they deserve to hear it from the FSF perspective as well as the Open 
Source crowd and wherever else. If you already know that, of course it 
makes sense to have less interest.

The Business Software Alliance, the MPAA, the RIAA, and others make sure 
the proprietary mindset is widely preached, so I see no need to give them 
an additional venue to spread their doctrine. (In which class I presume 
some of the people who don't want to hear from Darl McBride are putting 
him.)

Jon

-- 
Jon Jensen
End Point Corporation
http://www.endpoint.com/