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Comment by rmc | Hacker News Reader

That's been RMS & FSF's position for decades. They view it as wrong that you have software which you do not have the four freedom for.

Many legal and ethnical systems have limitations on what you can consent to. You're not allowed to consent to work for less than the minimum wage, for example

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However, if they were really radical they would license the whole GNU stack under the AGPL, because one cannot use SAAS software without the server side portion.

I find the FSF stance a bit inconsistent here.

There were discussions about doing just that for the GPLv3 when it was under discussion.

This is a little bit different. The only reason proprietary software exists is the copyright clause in the Constitution, which grants the government a right to issue limited-time monopolies to creators of original works.

Revoking a government-granted monopoly is very libertarian. Revoking mutual consent is the opposite.

Of course, this deals only with the freedom to copy/distribute, which is IMO the most interesting one anyway.

For example, from https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/comp.sys.mac.announce/... :

"allowing system software to be distributed free of charge via these organizations has limited our ability to convince Apple resellers to distribute and promote Apple system software products to their customers."

This is only an American perspective.

This is one of the cases where the American perspective just gives us a convenient language for discussing something more universal. By an accident of history, the US constitution cements inside a legal document the result of debates and lobbying that was going on all over the western world at the time.

Others at the time were also discussing the propriety of IP, and eventually agreed in favour of a limited form of it. Over time, it got strengthened further.

Proprietary software can be that way via unavailable source code and/or DRM without any government monopoly. So, legal elimination of proprietary software would require abolishing copyright and patent laws and mandating source release for published works along with prohibition of DRM.

Not everyone agrees with libertarianism

Proprietary software would also exist without any copyright, people would just guard their trade secrets, obfuscate code and put it server-side more than they already do now. The free software movement uses copyright to protect the freedoms, it is not a "libertarian" movement and never claimed to be. It wants to ensure that programmers and users of software have the four freedoms that RMS has laid out in many talks.

Perhaps a BSD style license is what you personally prefer. RMS has argued against such licenses for decades. Even if you disagree with him, please don't blame him for being inconsistent or defending a view that is not thought through.

Also, if you do not like the GPL, then you should perhaps be consistent and not use GPL software at all.

> Also, if you do not like the GPL, then you should perhaps be consistent and not use GPL software at all.

The reasons one sometimes has to use GPL software are quite similar for the reasons one sometimes has to use proprietary software. So the answer for GPL haters should rather be: avoid using GPL software (if possible), but more importantly: don't contribute to GPL software and contribute to software with "better" licensing so that one can (in future) create devices that are proprietary-software-free and copyleft-free at the same time.

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