Re: Freedom. . . NOT

[David Kastrup]

RonB <ronb02noSPAM@gmail.com> writes:

> Rjack wrote:
>
>> "So over the weekend I began to think about the GPL and my general
>> disdain for it. For a license that is touted as 'free', it certainly
>> doesn't feel that way. As a libertarian, I've often found myself
>> baffled by the leftist stance that freedom has to be enforced with
>> overwhelming regulation, and to me, the GPL is one of the best
>> examples of such repression. Its viral nature is neither business nor
>> government friendly, and its proliferation places a great strain on a
>> developer's ability to quickly and freely incorporate quality
>> software into highly complex and disparate systems. . . "
>> 
>> http://www.tbradford.org/2008/09/kinder-gentler-free-software-license.html
>
> They incorporate and share -- why should that be a "viral nature." So
> what is it the writer is advocating? Legal theft?

The stock answer would be that he wants to reap the benefits from the
work of others without any obligations to behave similarly.  But taking
a look at the article, it rather seems he has a case of NIH and is just
confused.

The funny thing is that his proposed license is not a license (since it
extends its scope to "any product that uses this software") but a
contract, is not a public license (since it reserves special rights to
"the authors" which are not defined explicitly), is contradictory ("must
be accompanied by publicly available information" without definition of
"publicly available"), contains legally nonsensical parts (the whole
stuff about how you may arbitrate different conditions for use: of
course you can always do that).

So his proposed cure is quite worse than the purported problem.

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum