Re: if you have something to contribute, please contact <address@hidden> with an informal proposal

[Goury]

Hi, I feel I can contribute a story about new reality of copyleft infringement that may give us a good reason to write GNU GPL v4

Long story short, this is how it works (just an example):

1. I draw a design or a picture, using FreeCAD or Krita
2. I share it under a free license
   
3. Someone else takes it, converts it to a proprietary adobe's or autodesk's format
   
4. One then makes changes and distributes one's changed version
5. Now, even though it does not violate the license, I can not even open this modified version without abandoning my membership in the church of Emacs
6. RMS's proposal to "ask someone else to open it for you" isn't helping for many reasons:
1. Someone else have to pay the corporate tax and also be a heretic to the church of Emacs, I don't want others to commit such a sin
   
2. There may not be an option to export back to any free format, and even when it exists, it usually is very much defective by design
3. It's a systemic problem that must be addressed, like tivoization, except this time it is done by the users of that proprietary software

It is very important to take action before bad companies realize they can use this loophole to literally steal our copyleft just by forcing large enough group of people to redistribute it in a proprietary format.

I can also contribute a story about google removing my whole account with every license I've paid for and every bit of my and my clients data on that account.
It can be nice to remind people why it is better to avoid such relationships with bad companies, even though it didn't go against the ideals of the church of Emacs a single bit.