Picking a license

[Patrick Maupin]

On May 9, 12:08 pm, Paul Boddie <p... at boddie.org.uk> wrote:
> On 9 Mai, 09:05, Carl Banks <pavlovevide... at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>
> > Bottom line is, GPL hurts everyone: the companies and open source
> > community.  Unless you're one of a handful of projects with sufficient
> > leverage, or are indeed a petty jealous person fighting a holy war,
> > the GPL is a bad idea and everyone benefits from a more permissive
> > licence.
>
> Oh sure: the GPL hurts everyone, like all the companies who have made
> quite a lot of money out of effectively making Linux the new
> enterprise successor to Unix, plus all the companies and individuals
> who have taken the sources and rolled their own distributions.

So, people overstate their cases to make their points.  That happens
on both sides.

> It's not worth my time picking through your "holy war" rhetoric when
> you're throwing "facts" like these around. As is almost always the
> case, the people who see the merit in copyleft-style licensing have
> clearly given the idea a lot more thought than those who immediately
> start throwing mud at Richard Stallman because people won't let them
> use some software as if it originated in a (universally acknowledged)
> public domain environment.

No, you appear to have a kneejerk reaction much worse than Carl's.
You have assumed you fully understand the motives of people who point
out issues with the GPL, and that those motives are uniformly bad, and
this colors your writing and thinking quite heavily, even to the point
where you naturally assumed I was defending all of Apple's egregious
behavior.

As far as my throwing mud at Stallman, although I release some open
source stuff on my own, I make a living writing software that belongs
to other people, and Stallman has said that that's unethical and I
shouldn't be able to make money in this fashion.  Sorry, but he's not
on my side.

> P.S. And the GPL isn't meant to further the cause of open source: it's
> meant to further the Free Software cause, which is not at all the same
> thing. Before you ridicule other people's positions, at least get your
> terminology right.

And, again, that's "free" according to a somewhat contentious
definition made by someone who is attempting to frame the debate by co-
opting all the "mother and apple pie" words, who is blindly followed
by others who think they are the only ones who are capable of thoughts
which are both rational and pure.  I'm not saying everybody who uses
the GPL is in this category, but some of your words here indicate that
you, in fact, might be.

Regards,
Pat