Re: Challenge: Find potential use cases for non-trivial confinement

[Bas Wijnen]

On Mon, May 01, 2006 at 11:29:13PM +0200, Pierre THIERRY wrote:
> Scribit address@hidden dies 01/05/2006 hora 20:24:
> > GNU explicitely does *not* support the "freedom" to distribute
> > non-free software.
> 
> I may have misunderstood something:
> 
> - does emacs forbids writing non-free software?
> - does gdb forbids debugging non-free software?
> - does ddd forbids debugging non-free software?
> - does gcc forbids compiling non-free software?
> - does make forbids building non-free software?
> - does cons forbids building non-free software?
> - does autoconf forbids building non-free software?
> - does bash forbids running non-free software?
> - does gnash forbids running non-free software?
> - does guile forbids running non-free software?
> - does dejagnu forbids testing non-free software?
> - does grub forbids booting non-free software?
> - does linux forbids running non-free software?
> - does hurd forbids running non-free software?

No.  Because they can't do that.  It's simply outside the terms a license can
set.  Some companies try to make licenses which are really contracts.
Contracts can set such terms.  But that practice is legally dubious, and also
brings some risks with it, because it's harder to disclaim responsibility for
problems.

> Why the hell was the LGPL invented for, if not to support proprietary
> software developers wanting to use free software libraries?

The LGPL was originally called the "Library General Public License", but this
was changed into "Lesser General Public License".  The FSF actually recommends
using the GPL, not the LGPL, for libraries, unless there is a non-free
alternative available.  This is because in that case, people would simply use
the non-free alternative instead of the GPL'd one if they wanted to make
proprietary software, so then we have proprietary software and a proprietary
library.  With the LGPL we can at least make that proprietary software with a
free library.  But the FSF does in fact recommend to license "new" libraries
under the GPL, so people will have to license their work under the GPL as well
if they want to use that library.

> Have your read why the LALR(1) C parser output of Bison is not free
> software, but public domain instead?

Because if it would be free software, Bison would simply not get used at all
by a lot of people.  This is exactly one of the strategic compromises, where
the idea is to "lure" people into free software, not scare them away.

Thanks,
Bas

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