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Comment by Joker_vD | Hacker News Reader

How is a program "free" if using it forces you to make to release your own code under specific (or precisely compatible) license? Giving up your original rights seems to be the worst kind of payment, and I'm not even talking about FSF's obsession with strongly nudging software authors into yielding their copyright to FSF.

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> Giving up your original rights seems to be the worst kind of payment

That's only an issue if you think that payment is more important to you. FSF are fighting for freedom. Money is secondary.

Now, you can argue about what is the best option to achieve freedom. FSF has chosen one (which I happen to agree with). There are others.

I'm just using FSF terminology when describing a FSF point of view. I myself don't agree with the FSF stance on that issue, but the point still stands - the FSF is an advocacy organization (not a tech organization) that is at its very core about promoting any free (per their definition) software as superior.

Are you really free without the right to enslave other people?

I release all my code under MIT license. Do I still have the right to enslave other people? If yes, could you please describe the details, I'd be rather interested to learn how I can force whoever uses my code to use MIT license as well? Thank you.

The point is that the people who use your software have that awkward right, which you have carefully granted them (as that is the only right removed by the GPL). This is frankly sufficiently obvious that I can only imagine you are arguing in bad faith :/. Like, I definitely have seen good-faith arguments against the GPL, but this is not one of them.

So I can't force other people myself, but I still am a (potential) accomplice in a completely different kind of "forcing other people" stuff because I didn't explicitly prohibited others from doing it. I... understand this argument, thank you.

P.S. "Carefully granted"? The words "to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to [rather long list of verbs]" is anything but "carefully granted", it's a blanket permission.

By taking away one freedom (the right to relicense software under other licenses or exploit the software, analogical to slavery), you grant more people more freedom (the freedom to modify and use *their* software as they please, analogical to abolishing slavery).

And yet including the additional restriction "this software may not be used to enslave people" makes the software no longer "free". It's odd how often slavery is mentioned in examples about how free copyleft software is, while the first of the so called four freedoms insists that using software to literally enslave people is a freedom that must be protected.

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