Re: The GPL dream is finally over!

[Rjack]

Alexander,

OMG. This guy sounds just like Daniel Wallace (it isn't though):

"Dammit, the world at large has been far too nice to these people for
far too long.  There's no sin in people getting rich and/or famous,
but how they did it deserves some scrutiny.  The FSF is leading
thousands of idealistic young people all over the world up the garden
path by bullshitting about the nature of US law, and if Moglen at
least isn't making bank doing it, it isn't for lack of trying.  For
starters, read http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2005/07/msg00531.html
(another self-reference that doesn't need flowing in).  Google around
for his letters of opinion (not pro bono, I assure you) to Fluendo and
Vidomi.  How do they smell to you?

The GPL is big money, folks; the FSF General Counsel's designing "GPL
circumvention" schemes for other people's software -- and estopping
away his ability to contest them in court, one letter of opinion (and
one hefty lump-sum fee) at a time -- isn't a tenth of it.  Ask the
OSDL, who (I am very sorry to report) funneled $4M of certain hardware
makers' money to the SFLC to bankroll the expansion of Moglen's
protection racket.  Yes, protection racket.  What other phrase could
possibly describe the Software Freedom Conservancy?

Speaking of protection rackets, how about Moglen's plaintive comments,
back in the day, to the effect of (not a direct quote):  "The
conditions of the GPL can't touch Red Hat's new trademark policy,
subscription agreement, and ISV support lock-ins because they aren't
about copyright.  The GPL, as we all know, is a creature of copyright
law.  Even though the GPL says plainly, 'You must cause any work that
you distribute or publish, that in whole or in part contains or is
derived from the Program or any part thereof, to be licensed as a
whole at no charge to all third parties under the terms of this
License', that can't possibly be taken as an 'entire agreement'
clause, because the GPL isn't an offer of contract.  Don't like having
to pay per seat for RHEL?  Sorry, we can't help you."

This would be the same Red Hat that bought Cygnus Solutions in 1999 at
an estimated price of 674 MILLION dollars (in stock, of course).  That
made some individual Cygnus stockholders rich; see
http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/1999/11/18/red_hat/print.html.  Want
to bet Moglen held a Cygnus share or two, along with (via the FSF)
control over all the source code Cygnus had ever produced?  How does
it smell now?

There's yet more money in the toolchain oligopoly that Moglen and
Redmond tacitly share, and in embedded targets generally.  (Have you
ever asked yourself how the XCode and Tornado IDEs happened?  Have you
ever tried to obtain their source code?  Now do you understand why the
FSF fetishizes the fork/exec boundary?)  Redmond is not the FSF's
enemy; the phantom menace called "software patents" is, because they
protect other software makers from the FSF's volunteer army of reverse
engineers.  All those crocodile tears over TiVo, just because they
forked GCC, put the lower layers of MPEG into silicon, and wrote their
own damn DRM in RTL, instead of toeing Moglen's line on "give me naked
ripped media or give me death".  (No, I don't have first-hand
knowledge of any of these dealings; do your own research if you want
the sordid details.). . ."

http://lkml.org/lkml/2007/2/18/15

Sincerely,
Rjack :)