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Comment by jm4 | Hacker News Reader

You're right. It probably does happen all the time. Just last week in one of those GPL vs. BSD threads someone posted a link to a story about how the author of CLISP was more or less coerced into using the GPL license. In any case, through coercion or not, releasing Linux drivers under the GPL is probably the right thing to do. Many users are strongly against loading proprietary binary blobs into their kernel. Still, not all vendors open source drivers so that ones that do could potentially enjoy a competitive advantage.

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To be fair, the CLISP guy seemed to want to GPL his stuff towards the end of the thread. RMS was, as always, heavy-handed and mentioned legal action before even asking, "hey, do you want to GPL this"? That says nothing about the GPL and a lot about RMS' personality.

The end result is that CLISP is one of the better CL implementations, and seems to have a pretty decent following. I don't know if it was like that before it was GPL'd or not, though.

For good or ill, GPL reflects RMS' personality, in much the same way start-ups reflect their founder's personality. GPL is a polemical, political statement, not just a software license. That reflects the fact that RMS is a moral philosopher, not just a programmer.

This is not to say that we should judge GPL by RMS' personality - GPL, just like companies people create, will stand on its own; all I am saying is that GPL is strongly influenced by the personality of its creator.

Agreed. Stallman strongly believes stuff should be free (not a bad atitude) and so the GPL tends to force things to be free in sequence.

Personally I find the GPL distasteful; because it locks you in. Frustrating (and I cant help feeling causes substantial code duplication for some projects that dont want to use GPL code)

(disclaimer; Im not personally a fan of Stallman, so I might be a bit biased over it)

Personally I find the GPL distasteful; because it locks you in. Frustrating (and I cant help feeling causes substantial code duplication for some projects that dont want to use GPL code)

That's probably true of any license based on philosophy. People who don't agree may be inclined to reinvent the wheel just to put it under a license they do believe in.

"Personally I find the GPL distasteful; because it locks you in. Frustrating (and I cant help feeling causes substantial code duplication for some projects that dont want to use GPL code)"

Were there any licenses prior to the GPL that didn't do that? Surely you couldn't just take a piece of IBM or AT&T's code and put it into your programs with no strings attached. That era was before my time, so please educate me if I'm mistaken.

well it's before mine too so I have no idea :)

You're right on all points, and I believe licensing CLISP under the GPL was a good thing. Still, RMS was basically a bully about it. It's reasonable to think the guy might have GPL'd the code anyway because he did seem to agree with the philosophy behind it, but when there are veiled threats of legal action almost right from the start of the conversation that seems like coercion to me.

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