wxPython Licence vs GPL

[Paul Boddie]

Ed Jensen wrote:
> Try this little experiment: Walk up, at random, to 100 people on the
> street.  Show them a software CD-ROM -- a game, a word processor,
> whatever.  Tell them it's free.  Then ask them what they think that
> means.

It's interesting that you bring this tired thought experiment up in the
context of the original remark: "Its license is far more "free" than
GPL is." If we were focusing on the "vox pop" interpretation of the
word "free", that remark wouldn't make any sense at all: after all,
what's more gratis than gratis (to use a less ambiguous word)?

[...]

> The success of things like Python -- which is not GPL licensed, afaik
> -- pretty much proves the GPL is unnecessary for the success of free
> projects.

Python is moderately successful, yes, but the GPL is a useful tool to
ensure that certain freedoms are preserved. I've been made aware of a
certain level of dissatisfaction about whether organisations porting
Python to other platforms would choose to share their modifications and
improvements with anyone, or whether binary downloads with restrictive
usage conditions would be the best even the customers of such
organisations would be able to enjoy. Ensuring some of those freedoms
can be an effective way of making open source software projects
successful.

> The GPL is just some bizarre social agenda being pushed by some crazies, and a lot
> of programmers (who are not lawyers) fell for the hippie nonsense.

At least when it comes to software licensing, what probably upsets the
anti-GPL "pragmatic licensing" crowd the most is that Stallman is quite
often right; the BitKeeper debacle possibly being one of the more
high-profile cases of some group's "pragmatism" (or more accurately,
apathy) serving up a big shock long after they'd presumably dismissed
"the hippie nonsense".

> So, you may like to bandy around the mildly offensive "free as in freeloading",

Well, from what I've seen of open source software usage in business, a
key motivation is to freeload, clearly driven by people who neither see
nor understand any other dimension of software freedom than your "vox
pop" definition. Such users of open source software could make their
work a lot easier if they contributed back to the projects from which
they obtained the software, but I've seen little understanding of such
matters. Of course, businesses prefer to use euphemisms like "cost
reduction" or "price efficiency" rather than the more accurate
"freeloading" term, and they fail to see any long-term benefits in
anything other than zero cost, zero sharing acquisition and
redistribution of code. But then in some sectors, the game is all about
selling the same solution over and over again to the same customers, so
it's almost understandable that old habits remain.

> but then that gives me the right to refer to GPL'd software as "free as in pushing my
> personal social agenda".

Pushing on whom, though? No-one makes you use GPL'd software by, for
example, installing it on almost every computer you can buy from major
vendors. If, on the other hand, you mean that some social agenda is
being imposed on you because, in choosing to redistribute someone's
work, you are obliged to pass on those freedoms granted to you by the
creator (or distributor) of that work, then complaining about it seems
little more than a foot-stamping exercise than anything else.

Paul