The Coral Snake Ping.
Calling all Anti Commies and Anti Pirates
Calling all Anti Commies and Anti Pirates
So ... your point is?
Yes, this does make it harder to make money at it. Or at least, one has to be more creative in finding alternative business models, than just straight propriatary software.
But customers love it, because software becomes more common, more sensibly priced, and open if need be to change and maintenance without worries that the initial vendor will go out of business or charge fees based more on extortion than reasonable costs and profits.
Is all communism bad?
Civilizaton has gained greatly over the past few centuries from the work of professors in Universities, who needed to "publish or perish". They did not personally become rich, in most cases, but for our most complex intellectual human endeavors, that require the contributions of many great and minor contributors, over years and decades of effort, public sharing does lead to the best results.
I think your hatred of all things communal is way over drawn.
Now if someone could just explain to me why I have bothered to respond to such spew in the first place, ... I would sleep better tonight.
Lost me here... this is the silliest thing I've seen in quite a while.
Sorry, Dude, but you kinda lost me here. This is how every whacko sign on a Berekeley streetcorner is written. After a while you stop trying to figure out what it means because it doesn't mean anything.
Richard M Stallman, The Leftist King of the Free Software Foundation
Linus Torvalds, The Commie's Son and Kernel Maintainer
Eric Raymond, Anarchist and "Neo Pagan"
Okay, so you have hangups about certain personalities. Even the most foolish fool can have a good idea... occasionally... once in a while. But to project Marxism upon all three and then reject everything they've touched (notwithstanding the fact that all three are living in this country and contributing to the economy by choice) seems pretty juvenile to me. I don't know any of these guys, and I've never even e-mailed them. But they all have a right to think whichever way they want, and if you write good code then who cares what your political direction is?
... BECAUSE OF THE BASIC SOCIALIST NATURE OF THE LICENSE no one has been able to make any significant money from this feature though Red Hat has made a few of "kinda sorta" profits on its Linux distribution before dropping it for a pure "services" approach to GPLed software.
We'll explore the "socialist nature" question later. What has Red Hat dropped? They just released version nine. They have a beta out for version ten. The only thing they've dropped is support for 7.3 and earlier, effective at EOY 2003.
.. the GPL REQUIRES open source distribution while more traditional Open Source license like BSD and MIT merely encourage it.
Yup, if you're going to distribute your changes, you must include the source code. If you don't like it, keep your stuff to yourself and don't re-distribute. That's the deal. You got the software for free in the first place, the least you can do is contribute something, so quit whining about it. This license gives you the RIGHT to modify and copy without paying a fee -- no commercial software license will let you do that for any amount of money.
(If you have ever heard the term "poison pill" when referring to one of the GPL's provisions THIS is that provision. It basically TERMINATES your GPL software distribution privilege if you distribute a program that has as much as a SINGLE function call in it if that call comes from a GPLed programmer's library if you do so in a closed source commercial program.
So that's what you mean by "poison pill"... okay. Software licenses usually cancel themselves if you violate the terms of the license.. what's the big deal?
This "poison pill" provision is what also makes the GPL communistic and "viral".
In your mind, with visions of Karl Marx dancing on sugar plums, perhaps. If the idea of a legal document saying that you can't take someone else's property and pass it off as your own is "communistic", then The Ten Commandments is "communistic" as well. So is most of US law. But that's okay, you have a right to think and say whatever you want to under the US Constitution (I dare say you wouldn't call that "communistic" as well.)
It was DESIGNED with the express purposes of stealing commercial code that comes onto contact with it for the "collective good" of the "community".)
Two points on this:
Quoth the poster:
5. You are not required to accept this License, since you have not signed it. However, nothing else grants you permission to modify or distribute the Program or its derivative works. These actions are prohibited by law if you do not accept this License. Therefore, by modifying or distributing the Program (or any work based on the Program), you indicate your acceptance of this License to do so, and all its terms and conditions for copying, distributing or modifyingthe Program or works based on it.(These sections are basically the reason that programmers trying to make a profit from the distribution fee provisions of the GPL will to so WHEN PIGS FLY!!! They are basically a copyright warning used to implement the "poison pill" provision legally. They make ANY conventional means of taking advantage of the distribution fee provision virtually impossible.)
6. Each time you redistribute the Program (or any work based on the Program), the recipient automatically receives a license from the original licensor to copy, distribute or modify the Program subject to these terms and conditions. You may not impose any further restrictions on the recipients' exercise of the rights granted herein.
Those two paragraphs went straight over your head, didn't they? Allow me to clarify: Copyright law gives you a right to USE a program copyrighted by someone else, but you cannot COPY or MODIFY or DISTRIBUTE unless you are given an explicit right to do so. That's what GPL does. It does NOT say that you can't earn some money by selling GPL code, only that you cannot charge for the source code. See this note in the GPL FAQ.
7.... For example, if a patent license would not permit royalty-free redistribution of the Program by all those who receive copies directly or indirectly through you, then the only way you could satisfy both it and this License would be to refrain entirely from distribution of the Program.(This section is basically a leftist dig at software patents written in legalese (yecchh!!!) basically it terminates the GPL for "free software" found to violate such patents or copyright law in a court of law and bans the cross licensing of such patents if they remain proprietary. If this single section did not exist in the GPL and cross licensing between between GPLed software and proprietary software were allowed the SCO v IBM case might not have even been filed let alone made it to court.)
This section apparently escaped you as well.
8. If the distribution and/or use of the Program is restricted in certain countries either by patents or by copyrighted interfaces....(This allows for bans on the distribution of GPLed software to nations where it may violate software patents or interface copyrights. The main problem here is that does NOT allow for such bans on enemy nations or terrorist organizations who may use the open code for something like Linux to learn how to crack its security provisions or build terrorist weapons like computerized "drone" aircraft full of WMD materials. This aspect of the GPL's lack of ability to keep source code out of the wrong hands probably makes it the best "legal" tool for ESPIONAGE ever developed.)
And pray tell, do you know of any other software license, whether free or non-free which can do this? Okay, certain EULAs state that you're not allowed to do benchmarks, or critique the product, but how enforcable is this... really?
9..... Each version is given a distinguishing version number. If the Program specifies a version number of this License which applies to it and "any later version", you have the option of following the terms and conditions either of that version or of any later version published by the Free Software Foundation. If the Program does not specify a version number of this License, you may choose any version ever published by the Free Software Foundation.(This may actually be the most dangerous part of the GPL of all with the possible exception of the "poison pill" provision. Eventually leftist groups like the Free Software Foundation, The Open Source Intitative and "Free Developers" want to make a monopoly as pervasive as Microsoft is now for the Marxist software development model represented by this license for virtually all computer devices that will ever be made. That is basically what the version changes alluded to are all about.)
It's simply a version control system. If a certain version works for you, use that. You don't have to be governed by the latest one. See this note in the FAQ. It's pretty flexible. For example, Linus has decided that the kernel work will be protected by Version 2, for whatever reason. If someone tries to pull a fast one with, say, Version 5, we don't all have to follow. So don't worry; Stallman can't use this to take over the world.
The basic goal of the "Free Software" movement as a whole is essentially to make software under the GPL as pervasive a monopoly as Microsoft is now by the use of a classic Marxist means.....
This whole section of yours is as ridiculous as it seems. We free-software types don't want a monopoly. We need commercial software. Those guys research the market and give us all a sense of where things are going. They know better than us what the customers want. They give us something to emulate.
Commercial software needs us. We give them competition that they cannot squelch in traditional ways, so we keep their prices in check and make them concentrate on their quality.
We provide an alternative to the socialist single-sourced one-platform-for-the-masses mentality in the commercial software world. The GPL protects our software from being stolen by the socialists for their own gain. They have the money to do pretty much whatever they want to do. It is the legal document of the GNU General Public License, written by a lawyer in easily understandable plain english, which holds Microsoft, et al, at bay. They've read the document and they understand it. Nobody wants to be the first to test this thing in court, except perhaps SCO. It's formidable.
But it's far from being communist. It is a Declaration of Independence for the software hobbyist.
.. END THE SINGLE SEAT LICENSE POLICY and replace it with a by the family or by the business licensing policy.
Agreed.