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Comment by Ace17 | Hacker News Reader

> There are certainly licenses offering more freedom than GPL v3.

More freedom to who? Users, distributors, maintainers, vendors, service providers? You can't guarantee complete freedom to each of them simultaneously.

For example, allowing distributors to do everything they want (e.g not providing source code) will prevent users to do everything they want (e.g modifying the program). So it makes no sense to talk about which license "offers more freedom".

So, let's stop saying imprecise things like "GPL code doesn't give me freedom because I can't use such code in my proprietary software". The free software movement is about protecting the freedoms of the end users first.

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>More freedom to who?

In the same way that a a very inexperienced french candidate for presidency is claiming that he will "liberate France by the work", ear "deregulate the working laws and make possible for companies to get rid of the employees whenever they want without any compensation". Freedom for employers.

There is absolutely no possible way that you can defend GPL as being more free than licenses like BSD/MIT. Copyright is about being able to copy the software. GPL places restrictions on who is able to copy your software. BSD/MIT place less restrictions. It's black and white; there is no argument.

When a project includes code from another project (be it GPL or MIT), it is creating a new work under copyright. What GPL does is hold the developer ransom with a lighter over the GPL code, in order to guarantee the new work is distributed to other people with the same restrictive license. It just means that code under GPL is orders of magnitude less valuable to the world than code under less restrictive licenses.

It's not just about proprietary software that can't put GPL code into their software, but software that's released under less restrictive licenses as well. If code is GPL, I just stay away.

You can't take credit for a lack of restrictions when users face draconian binary-only no-redistribution-ever restrictions that you turned a blind eye to.

While we're voting with our feet, I don't contribute to BSD projects unless I'm paid to, because it's mostly feeding parasites.

> It just means that code under GPL is orders of magnitude less valuable to the world than code under less restrictive licenses.

The most-installed kernel in the world is GPL-licensed. I'm not sure how it could possibly be orders of magnitude more valuable.

> What GPL does is hold the developer ransom with a lighter over the GPL code

It's not a 'ransom' when the ticket price is clearly displayed for all to see. If you don't want to play, that's cool, find another sandpit to play in.

Like it or not, the GPL moved the needle back towards end-user friendliness, and without it and it's knock-on effects elsewhere, being a developer today would be a much more frustrating experience.

> There is absolutely no possible way that you can defend GPL as being more free than licenses like BSD/MIT.

If you define free in terms of users and individual developers, GPL is absolutely more free than BSD/MIT, but if you define it in terms of software development houses, MIT is much more "free" than the GPL indeed.

The argument against the GPL having restrictions on what you can do with the code as to not take away freedom, is like the U.S Constitution having restrictions on what the government is allowed to do to restrict your freedom.

Nobody would argue that the right to free speech is restrictive, because it takes away your right to restrict free speech, or would they?

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