Re: Social Contract
Mike McCarty wrote:
[...] I do not and have not claimed ever that Linux+GNU hamper
anyone's freedom. How can an OS hamper anyone's freedom? It seems an
impossibility to me.
Mike
There you go again--bearing false witness--this time to your own words:
In Message-ID: <[🔎] 4451206A.8080905@sbcglobal.net> Mike McCarty wrote:
Michael Marsh wrote:
[...] At its heart, the GPL merely says that the software is being
given away freely, and you can do anything you like with it except
rescind that freedom.
This is emphatically not what the GPL and similar licenses say. If,
for example, you incorporate a library built under GPL by linking
with it, then the license forces you to release *your own* code under
GPL or compatible license. This is not freedom as I define it.
If Debian really wanted all their stuff to be truly free, then they
would have to prohibit all the GPL stuff from being in it. But
promoting and incorporating GPL stuff means that they also support
that social agenda. The one cannot be separated from the other, as
the social agenda is what the GPL is about. [...]
Evidently, your opposition to the GPL is based on the fact that it
eliminates people's "freedom" to enslave one another using information.
From the Emancipation Proclamation:
all persons held as slaves within any State or designated part of a
State, the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the
United States, shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free.
Public domain software, in practice, is not really free for most people.
Typically, someone will take the PD software, improve it and release it
as proprietary. Human nature dictates that many developers will do this.
The majority of users of the software will be using the improved, but
proprietary, versions. The freeness of PD software lasts only for a
short duration, and only for people who want to use the original (buggy,
old) version.The GPL improves significantly upon PD in supporting
software freedom.
The GPL is a kind of Emancipation Proclamation of software usage. If you
condense the GPL tightly enough to squeeze out the legalese, it says
this: This software is free, and it's users and developers are free.
They are free and shall be, thenceforward, forever free.
"Forever free" is what the GPL offers us. What's so bad about that?
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