Re: [LI] Message from RMS.

[Arun Sharma <adsharma@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Raghavendra Bhat's mail containing RMS quote:

> 
> [The lists redhat-devel-list@xxxxxxxxxx and gnome-list@xxxxxxxxx would
> not let me post to them.  If you can, would you please forward this
> reply to those lists?]
> 

I'm actually surprised. Whoever controls gnome-list must be holding tons of
Redhat stock :-)

> Many of you are aware that the GNU Project objects to this.  If you've
> heard about this from other people, you may have heard an inaccurate
> rendition of the reasons why; people who disagree and those who
> support us often oversimplify them.  See
> http://www.gnu.org/gnu/linux-and-gnu.html for the real explanation, if
> you're interested.

First, let me acknowledge the high quality technical work the GNU project
has contributed to the free software community. It was RMS's pioneering
work that led to GNU cc, which I think is his single most important
contribution to the community*. However, the politics surrounding the
GNU project is rather obnoxious. 

RMS and the GNU project have a very explicit agenda to be uncooperative
with closed source commercial entities with the goal of completely replacing
them with GPL'ed software (Note: this is not the same as free software). 

Open source is not a panacea. There are situations where it works better
than closed source. Hard economic realities dictate that a large amount of
commercial work will continue to be closed source. Further, open source
should be by choice - not by coercion as the GNU project seeks to achieve
it.

The GNU project claims that a commercial entity "takes away"
your freedom if they take your open source work, add some value and
sell it as closed source for money. The reality however is that your
freedom is perfectly intact. All the source that you wrote is still out
there for everyone to use. No one has taken your freedom away as RMS
repeatedly insists.

On the other hand, GPL restricts certain freedoms. It is not as 'free
as in speech' as public domain software or BSD licensed software. 
Specifically, it restricts your freedom to make commercial software
out of it.

GPL is also a viral license. If you have a piece of software that
has both GPL'ed code and code with licence <foo>, the end result
*has* to be GPL'ed, because GPL is the most restrictive of them all.

Get rid of the GPL virus. Make your software BSD licensed**. Do you want
a tomorrow where all software is GPL'ed or a tomorrow where there is 
a lot of open source software that peacefully coexists with commercial
software and offers enough incentive to entrepreneurs to base their
next innovation (Mr Gates has polluted this word - but I'll use it
anyway) on open source software ?

Even though you contribute code to GPL'ed projects like Linux, your code
doesn't have to be GPL'ed. The resulting work will be GPL'ed, but your
code will remain `free' to be used in other open source, non-GPL'ed
projects - Apache, X, FreeBSD, Perl, Python to name a few. Right now,
people who disagree with the GNU concepts are forced to rewrite code in
order to stay away from the virus. However, GPL'ed projects are free to
absorb code from other non-GPL'ed projects - just as Linux has absorbed
code from BSD.

The choice is yours.

If you're confused and need more information on the topic, feel free
to email me and I'll be happy to point you to more resources (both
pro and anti GPL).

	-Arun

* It is often said that if the GNU project didn't exist, Linux wouldn't have
  existed. I think otherwise - Linux would've used the fine BSD "operating
  system" (this is using RMS terminology, which excludes the kernel). gcc
  is an exception to this. BSD used a commercial compiler, before switching
  to gcc.

** A link to the FreeBSD license: 
   http://www.freebsd.org/copyright/copyright.html
   
   The only requirement on the source or binary user is acknowledgement of 
   your copyright and a legal disclaimer. It's as simple as that.