[!NEWS] The GNUtards Must Be Crazy

[Alexander Terekhov]

Interesting article... 

http://www.ttis.cn/article/general-health-care/2009-03-11/11167.html

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The GNUtards Must Be Crazy

at: 2009-03-11 22:28:25   

Chris Stone wrote a while back:

The GPL effectively prohibits any sort of commercial use. With version 3
due out soon, it gets even more restrictive because of the
Microsoft/Novell patent tax pact. The BSD and MIT licenses do not
prohibit commercial use. That means that it is possible for someone to
make money off of them, i.e., to eat, buy clothes, buy plasma TV’s.

This is the enlightened view. The MIT, BSD, and X11 licenses are the
only true "open source" licenses. They are clear, unambiguous, and allow
you to share your work in the spirit of scientific research. When others
improve on your work, they are free to either continue contributing to
that body of knowledge, or go make some money from their unique
contribution.

I don't feel bad when someone uses my BSD-licensed code to make money, I
feel happy. I intended to give it away, so I'm going to honestly give it
away, without lying to you and attaching strings to the gift.

The GPL is bigoted hate speech from a bitter dork who was upset that all
his Lisp buddies were leaving the AI lab and getting real jobs at
Symbolics, so he first tried to destroy them with an inferior copy of
their work, and when that failed, he made it his life's work to destroy
the commercial software industry. The GPL is solely about jealousy: they
aren't making any money, so they hate anyone else who is making money.
It's the same mental disorder that makes hippies hate all corporations
and businesses, because they're dirt-poor and stupid, so they resent
anyone else who isn't.

The GPL is discriminatory. It is biased against anyone who wants to
actually produce commercial software and make a living from it. It is
difficult, bordering on impossible, to make money from GPL software. Red
Hat, Novell, and a handful of others sell service, because Linux is so
hard to use and maintain that most people need service to use it. But if
they tried to sell licenses without support contracts for Linux, they'd
be crushed by Ubuntu giving it away for free. The most successful
business model Novell's found has been getting bribed by Microsoft.
Neither of these companies make any new software, they just repackage
someone else's software, and then try to extort money for it. The GPL
has led directly to extortion.

The GPL is a bait-and-switch. It shows you functional code that might
very well solve your problem, and then says, "Oh, no, you can't actually
use this, because you work for a living."

It's difficult to impossible to use open source software in many
interesting ways. Readline is a totally useless library for many
projects, because the GPL license is poison; if it was LGPL or BSD, it
would be ubiquitous. A normal, sane mind would be enthusiastic about
that, about seeing their tool be used and make others happy.

And Stallman's not getting more sane with age, either. In a Groklaw
interview, he says:

"Q: One final question. We're seeing more and more devices, and I'm
thinking specifically of games consoles -- I know that my kids have one
in the house -- where there is no --"

"Richard Stallman: I wouldn't. You have to learn how to say no to your
kids."

"Q: That's true, that's true, I wouldn't deny it. Now, there is no free
software at all for devices like this [correction: Yellow Dog supports
some console(s)]."

"Richard Stallman: That's why there is no possible ethical way you could
use one, and so you shouldn't have it."

Great. Now he's calling everyone who plays videogame consoles unethical.
Is there no end to this blackguard's insults against people who just
want to use some fucking software? As Thomas Becket asked, "Will nobody
rid us of this turbulent homeless loser?"

But then, let's look at all the great games which were written as GPL...
Oh, wait, there aren't any. If you're a totally obsessive GNUtard (or
the pitiable child of such a GNUtard), you can't play any new games,
only crappy ripoffs of commercial software. There are no equivalents to
Nintendo or Square/Enix in the GNU world. Even id software, who always
release Quake and Doom on Linux, don't do it as GPL. (Some developers,
including id, do release end-of-life software years later as GPL, just
as I do with BSD, but they weren't written and released under GPL
initially). And why is that? Because if you release a game as GPL,
someone else will give it away for free, and you'll go out of business.
There will then be no more new games. At least with commercial software,
you can fight the pirates with the law. But if you GPL your game, then
the pirates are protected by the law.

Chris's thought that the GPL causes slow-downs in development of open
source is exactly right. When have you EVER seen a truly innovative
piece of GPL software? Everything in GPL is a bad copy of some other
software that was developed under a commercial license or a true open
source license like BSD. Worse, GPL software damages and even drives out
commercial competitors; it doesn't have to be any good, it just has to
consume resources, like rabbits in Australia or pigeons in any city.

Linux is a copy of Unix. BSD Unix is years more advanced than Linux, and
MacOS X (which is based on BSD Unix) is 10-20 years ahead of Linux. 
gcc is just another C compiler, and not a very good one. The Intel
compilers compile significantly faster and produce faster and more
memory-efficient code from the same source. I'm sure Borland's compilers
are still faster and more efficient than gcc, too. There used to be many
others, but the widespread availability of a shitty but "free" gcc has
poisoned the market. There are alternative CPUs for which gcc is the
only real compiler, but that's not a positive feature, that's a tragedy. 
KDE and GNOME are hideous, difficult, and unstable desktop environments.
I'm appalled that these are what pass for a desktop environment on
Linux. While I have few kind words to say about Windows, at least their
desktop is better than KDE. There's no comparison at all to Mac OS X.
GNOME isn't even basically functional... GNOME is one of the worst
pieces of software I have ever seen in my life. 
The GIMP is... almost decent. It's not innovative in any way, it's still
an inferior copy of Photoshop, but at least for once a GNU program isn't
a complete piece of shit. I include it in this list because it shows the
best possible result for a GPL program: not a complete piece of shit,
but still a ripoff. 
The FSF is trying to make "Gnash", a replacement for Flash 7, and it's
apparently as attractive and functional as the name makes it sound.
Adobe already has a free version of its Flash 9 player for Linux. Not
that I understand why they bother; they get nothing but hate from the
FSF and a lot of the Linux community for providing Flash and Acrobat,
even though they give away free client software. 
OpenOffice.org is scarily ugly and barely functional. Now, it's
interesting that Sun's found a way to use GPL as a weapon against all
other office suites, and put out this crappy free version and then
charge for the slightly less terrible StarOffice version. But it's
ultimately just another MS Office clone. Compare that to, say, Apple's
iWork suite (Pages, Keynote); Pages is graceful and attractive and works
in a very different way from Word. It's certainly not as complex, and
that's a virtue. That's something that would never happen with GPL
software. 
Yes, there is bad closed-source software, too, every Microsoft product
being the canonical example... But normally the market weeds them out,
and for every bad closed-source commercial product, I can show you a
dozen crappy GPL equivalents.

Because he lives in the Bizarro universe where black is white, up is
down, and cats and dogs live together, Stallman doesn't even care about
functionality or originality:

"Write letters to the editor whenever you see a newspaper or magazine
praise non-free software, by judging it according to shallow criteria,
only caring what job it would do and what's the price and not caring
whether it respects your freedom."

Functionality is not shallow. Functionality is the purpose of software.
To get the job done. To do it cost-effectively, efficiently, reliably,
in an easy-to-use and attractive manner.

Whether or not you can modify a piece of software is meaningful only to
a handful of programmers. It makes no difference at all to the users. To
a working programmer, GPL software is useless, because you can't include
it in your software at work. So the only ones who find GPL software's
"freedom to modify" useful are bored college students and useless
hippies.

Ultimately, the GPL is about restricting the rights of programmers to do
as they wish with the software they write. Someone who loves liberty
would allow and encourage every programmer to release their software
under terms that they find acceptable for their own needs. For some
people, that'll be commercial; for some, BSD. But if he had the
political power, Stallman would put a gun to the head of every
programmer and force them to use the GPL, and would put a gun to the
head of every user and force them to only use GPL software. His
motivation is to steal your software and make it part of the FSF, so
that all new software development ends, all commercial software goes out
of business, and finally the demon of jealousy screeching in his head
can stop.

Stop giving a crazy person power over you. Don't use the GPL.
------

regards,
alexander.

--
http://gng.z505.com/index.htm
(GNG is a derecursive recursive derecursion which pwns GNU since it can
be infinitely looped as GNGNGNGNG...NGNGNG... and can be said backwards
too, whereas GNU cannot.)