I won't buy a house in an HOA. I'm not afraid of HOAs, I just have better things to do with my time than keep up with their demands.
I just had a back-and-forth with someone who outright lied about the legal enforceability of the GPL and it's all beginning to leave a nasty taste in my mouth. The BSD/MIT world is good, but some of its boosters are beginning to look like thugs for companies that profit off of unpaid labor.
Edit since I can't add new replies for some reason:
The anti-copyleft FUD I'm talking about is here:
It would lock them out of profitable business models, so they make a perfectly rational decision, as a business, to not use it. You can call that fear if you like, and I can call that "abuse of semantics" :)
> I don't want to be unpaid labor, I don't want people to recast being unpaid labor in terms of promoting freedom, and I damned well don't want people calling the licenses that keep me from being unpaid labor "fascist" as they did down-thread from here in this very discussion.
That's completely fair. If you develop open source code and you want to license it as copyleft, go ahead. It's your code.
The flip side is that if I develop an open source project, I'm free to make it MIT or whatever because I think the contributions of large companies to my project are valuable. Yes, they can make enhancements and not share them with me. But in practice, they will often merge them into my project because maintaining their own fork is expensive.
On the other hand, if I have to make my code copyleft because it uses your code, they will almost certainly not use or contribute to my code at all, because that would require theirs to be copyleft as well. Therefore I don't use or contribute to your code.
My decision not to use copyleft code isn't based on fear. It's because I know it will take my project in a direction I don't want it to go, and make it unusable for people who I would like to use it.
As for being unpaid labor, that's a personal choice as well. I don't care about it, personally. I'm working on my project either way, because I want to. It's no skin off my nose if somebody else finds a way to make money from it. The minute working on it becomes a burden, I'm free to stop.
I'm fine with people stating they don't use copyleft licenses.
I'm not fine with people spreading FUD about copyleft licenses.
I'm, in a broader sense, not fine with people spreading FUD that Just So Happens to align with the business interests of companies.
In short, you're arguing against anti-copyleft FUD, and I'm arguing against anti-non-copyleft FUD. Both are important for a FUD-free discussion.
>>> I suppose that the removal of this freedom is accidental, because it was a nice thing.
>> Not necessarily. Some people prefer the MIT/BSD/ISC family of licenses over GPL.
> Most of us have employers who are afraid of copyleft. That has made us afraid of copyleft, because we feel like our job is threatened by copyleft.
There's no anti-copyleft FUD here. All that's here is someone assuming someone else isn't a fan of copyleft because of "fear."
Good heavens, you're still going on about this two days later. There was a disagreement. No one "lied".
This is not appropriate behaviour.
Here's another analogy: I ate eggs instead of cereal for breakfast. I did this because I wanted protein and not carbs, not because I'm afraid of cereal. Likewise, I just don't want to do the things that copyleft requires, so I use MIT and the like instead.