Picking a license

[Patrick Maupin]

On May 9, 1:42 am, Paul Rubin <no.em... at nospam.invalid> wrote:
> Patrick Maupin <pmau... at gmail.com> writes:
> > I certainly agree that RMS's language is couched in religious rhetoric.
>
> I would say political movement rhetoric.  He's not religious.  He uses
> the word "spiritual" sometimes but has made it clear he doesn't mean
> that in a religious sense.

Oh, I agree he's not religious.  OTOH, I don't think bin Laden, or
most of the Ayatollahs, or priests who molest little boys, or Mormon
polygamists, or Branch Davidians are religious either.

But what these people have in common (and also have in common with
some _real_ religious people) is a fervent type of language and style
of speaking and writing, designed to attract religious followers, and
the ability and desire to frame disputes in black-and-white,
moralistic terms.  (And here in the states, at least, it's getting
increasingly hard to separate religion from politics in any case.)

This is not necessarily a bad thing -- it's what the religious leaders
exhort their followers to do that makes them good or bad.  As I have
discussed in other posts, I think the GPL is a good license for some
software and some programmers.  In a perfect world with no proprietary
software, it might even be the only license that was necessary, except
then it wouldn't even be necessary.  But in the messy real world we
live in, I
don't personally believe that it is the best solution for a large
class of software licensing problems.

Personally, I think the LGPL is a much better license for those who
are worried about people giving back, but the FSF has now, for all
practical purposes, deprecated it -- not directly, of course, but
implicitly, by changing the name from "Library" to "Lesser" and
damning it with faint praise by actually encouraging people who write
library components to try to help the tail wag the dog by using the
GPL instead of the LGPL.

Regards,
Pat