----- Original Message -----
> From: Al Gest
> In the real world a person's freedoms are very much decided by their
> ability to obtain those freedoms. That might not fall in line with
> your moralistic ideologies, but it is reality.
>
> The GPL is nothing more than Richard Stallman's highly encumbered
> temper-tantrum against propriety software, it has almost nothing to do
> with true freedom. The GPL is to propriety licenses what communism is
> to capitalism. It values the community over the individual, and
> protects the interests of the community at the cost of the individual.
> True freedom can only exist at the individual level, because once you
> introduce the interests of others you introduce restrictions. That
> isn't to say that the interests of others are not important of course,
> but to claim that the GPL is about freedom is just plain bull. The
> restriction of freedom is a necessity for the GPL to achieve its
> purpose, enforced sharing.
>
> Al.
>
I agree with you that I'm idealistic, and my ideals are admittedly usually
unobtainable in the real world. That doesn't mean I should drop them in favor
of something with which I disagree. Allowing anyone to achieve whatever goals
he wants, regardless of its affect on others, is wrong in my opinion. If
you're stifling another person's freedoms, you're doing something bad.
Unrestricted freedom is impossible, because if everyone is allowed the freedom
to do whatever he wants, eventually someone will suffer a loss of freedom.
I'd like to clarify a point which you seem to have misunderstood. I wasn't
claiming that the GPL is true freedom, but it is a reasonable compromise
between freedom for the original authors & "intellectual property" owners and
freedom for end users & hackers. Considering the differences in needs and
desires of both groups, there is no way to provide true freedom for both.
Licenses such as BSD and MIT are not true freedom any more than GPL is, because
they allow a developer to limit the freedom of end users and potential future
developers. They're free only up to the point when a dev decides to turn the
code into a proprietary product...something that can't be done with GPL.
That's not to say I disagree with the use of BSD/MIT and others like it...I
just disagree with people who support those licenses while rabidly claiming the
GPL to be some kind of evil cancer.
