Re: FSF : lackeys of their corporate masters

[Michael Elizabeth Chastain]

bernd> Naughty naughty naughty!  Get back to testing GDB right now!  :)

Hey, I just posted to gdb-testers.  I feel good now.  :)

mec> I think it should be the original author's choice whether to allow that
mec> free ride or not.
bernd> What if the law makes the right to freeride an inalienable one?

I would consider such a law unjust and immoral.

I acknowledge that the FSF and I have different goals here.  I'm in the
camp of Linus Torvalds: "He who writes the code chooses the license." If
I thought that the FSF had a higher chance of achieving their "software
tax" idea or any kind of mandatory GPL law, then I wouldn't contribute labor
to them.

bernd> I thought the rationale was to be able to enforce users' freedoms?
bernd> That's why they insist on copyright assignments, after all.

That's one of the reasons.  See the essays on LGPL versus GPL,
where the FSF says that libraries such as readline are intentionally GPL
because that induces other people to make *their* work GPL so that
they can take advantage of GPL. 

The GPL has worked fine for copyrights.  I've often wondered if it would
be useful to start a GPL-like patent pool instead of just knocking down
other people's patents.

bernd> Us in the GPL crowd want to disallow proprietary licenses.
bernd> Those in the proprietary crowd want to disallow the GPL.

Well, no.  I'm in the GPL crowd and I don't want to disallow proprietary
licenses.

Michael C