Hi Lohmann, On Mon, May 12, 2014 at 06:18:37PM +0200, Christoph Lohmann wrote: > History made me thinking about that stance in suckless. Yes, it’s com‐ > plete freedom, but the GPL made it possible to open up platforms not > open before. For example the US navy is using Open Source software to > kill people. I can’t really support this. Programming isn’t neutral any‐ > more. And, as OpenSSL shows, corporate assholes never really give back. > With the GPL you at least get their crown jewels, if they piss you off. >
I mostly agree with your point here, and the fact that things like this happen on Open Source is what makes me more favourable to the GPL in these days. I went to FISL[1] some days ago, a really cool event about free software and stuff, so I was really excited about suckless and thinking about submitting a presentation about it on the next one. But when I saw the LICENSE that we use, I kinda lost the excitement, still probably going to submit it. Then I went to see what's FSF's position on this, surprisingly they are quite cool about it for small projects[2]. Given suckless projects are mostly foundamental, in the sense they usually are good foundations, it would be quite nice if they were GPL. [1]: http://softwarelivre.org/fisl15 [2]: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#X11License
