25 years of GNU - support software freedom
fsf.org
fsf.org
Useful, nay, necessary at one time, but have now outgrown their original mandate and now exist unto themselves.
Fer chrissakes, do you think nothing has changed since then?
I make $20 an hour to code, and a guy I know makes $80/hour (he started at that wage!) to tape drywall and carry out garbage.
If I could take his job, I would. I mean ffs.
And that's in NYC.
No offense, but unless you are a grad student and this is your stipend, you are horribly underpaid. The problem is not unions, the problem is where you have chosen to work.
Urban dictionary -> blue collar
GPL is way too dogmatic, and given the fact that most free software actually is written by people with a paycheck from those hated proprietary software companies (at any rate, companies that definitely do not buy into FSF dogma), there always has been an underlying tension between their philosophy and the vast majority of contributors to open source. Basically Stallman wants them to feel dirty getting that paycheck.
As a result, we are moving to a different phase in the open source world - focus on code, not on the politics.
I want to add an illustration of the perverse effects GPL produced in practice. MySQL - now in the hands of Larry Ellison ... there must be some irony there - perfectly shows how to use GPL in a very "interesting" way. I have dealt with MySQL salesmen on several occasions, so I know how they "use" GPL. Basically they would assert with full confidence that your use-case (whatever it may be) would violate GPL, so you have to pony up unless you want all your code to be GPL. They knew how to exploit "GPL fear" in companies, but would back down in most cases once you bring a lawyer.
That is the practical real world effect of dogma. My prediction: MySQL will be orphaned intentionally by Oracle. No one else is going to touch it because forking the MySQL code will not let anyone escape the famous Oracle salesmen.
I'm not sure what, if any, contributions I can make to this cause. When I have anything worth releasing, I try to release BSD, but I'd really like to be able to contribute to llvm. I don't know that I necessarily have any skills that would be useful to them.
GPLv3 is horridly dogmatic. A great number of the old hackers are on some kind of corporate payroll, frequently Red Hat.
I'm not certain I'm 100% comfortable with the current corporate patronage system because it has allowed people like Ulrich Drepper to dig out his private little Hell with glibc and torment anyone who begs a moment of his time.
It isn't patronage system that's the problem, it's the people.
Anyway, just fork his work (eg. http://blog.aurel32.net/?p=47)
Oh how I laughed.
The man is more important than any given individual in the core Linux kernel team. The body of code he's managing is pretty scary as well.
What happened to MySQL happens to plenty of smaller projects whose original devs / maintainers get snapped up by companies to work on a commercial closed-source version.
There is no license which will insure the future of a project but if the code is popular enough you will always find someone to pick up the mantle.
My broader point is really about the problems of GPL in the real world, not open source in general. I am a huge fan of BSD/MIT/Apache, and thankfully a lot of contributors these days seem to like those licenses.
I have always viewed open source contributions as a form of charity. GPL is a highly encumbered form of charity (it is still charity, but think of charities tied closely to particular religious points of view). BSD/MIT/Apache is much more freely and liberally given and embody a generosity of spirit ("My charity recipients do not need to follow my religion"). My philosophical preference is the latter.
Said in much more succinct terms than I could have mustered.
Microsoft is still in control. What's their market share for Windows machines? 90+%?
Most windows machines these days are dumb clients to the web, so that fact that Microsoft provides the software for this doesn't seem like a huge win.
It was this openness that earned Microsoft its market monopoly on the OS and consequent positive network externalities - benefits that the company has leveraged to maintain its dominance of the desktop for two decades.
So what I'm proposing is this: perhaps the FSF did well during the reign of Microsoft not as a foil to the big, evil monopolistic corporation, but rather because the FSF is the logical conclusion of the very strategy Microsoft itself has used to establish and maintain its market share.
No he doesn't. He wants them to feel dirty for not contributing and for restricting the freedom of users whenever they work on proprietary stuff.
Many of the open-source licenses (I say open-source deliberately to distinguish them from GPL) are commercial friendly by design, .eg. ASL. Since we all need to earn a living we make compromises. Many corporations for better or worse prefer these licenses as they enable them to benefit from the collaborative model without having to give back the value they add. Some do this in a very ethical fashion by employing major contributors to projects, thereby by giving and getting, all good. However I would argue that these serve the interests of companies more than individual programmers.
So a question I have is, if the GPL is no longer relevant as many now claim, why was Git released as GPL?
I can totally see Oracle sales folks playing this FUD argument. As a programmer I typically look at sales people as what they are. They will say anything to make a deal.
Happy 25th FSF, I'm looking forward to the 50th.
License: GNU General Public License v2
Hint hint.
I don't think anyone, even Stallman, thinks making money from free software is a bad thing.
I worked at a company (that you've heard of) who basically ran their business on Free Software saving them God knows how much time, money and effort. The CEO announced one day (in public) that he didn't like the GPL as it was business unfriendly. He made no effort to hide the fact that he wanted to take code written by others (often for fun) and convert it to profit without giving _anything_ back. The GPL is a wonderful license.
I don't understand your mysql example. It sounds like the GPL did its job in that case.
But a full-on death for OSS is not going to happen.
The Creative Commons / Free Culture movement is fairly recent and only growing in popularity and it's easy to see how it dovetails with a lot of the FSFs work in software.
People (and very large corporations alike) are clearly still seeing the value in liberally licensing their works so that lots of people can enjoy them.
That is precisely what I meant.
>But a full-on death for OSS is not going to happen.
That's ludicrous, not what I said, and not what I want. I would carry the torch all by my lonesome if that actually happened.
>The Creative Commons / Free Culture movement is fairly recent and only growing in popularity
I don't care about either/or. I care about software.
>People (and very large corporations alike) are clearly still seeing the value in liberally licensing their works so that lots of people can enjoy them.
Mostly as a means of marketing/promotion in the hopes that people will pay for the stuff that they can't steal outright. Don't kid yourself otherwise.
The software landscape has changed, but software freedom remains essential. The FSF has been perhaps a bit slow to respond to some of the changes (e.g., the AGPL probably should have been developed years earlier), but the underlying message stays the same, and, I believe, is increasingly important as software usage continues to waft into every conceivable facet of our lives.
The AGPL will never ever succeed. It will only ever be used by egotistical idiots and dying companies that wish to sear a scarlet letter into their code -- noone but I may profit from this work
With a strict definition of "profit" this seems more a criticism of dual-licensed GPL works than the AGPL; software published under the AGPL does not grant any sort of monopoly to the person publishing it -- even if they were selling a proprietary version of the same code, it doesn't restrict third parties making money from it.
And if we weaken our definition of "profit" to mean some sort of benefit, then the argument is even weaker.
The copyright holder(s) that licensed their work under the AGPL are not subject to any such restrictions (no multi-licensing is necessary). There's no way to compete with them fairly.
I would certainly concede that this scenario would make it difficult for third parties to maintain feature parity, but that's a long way from saying the AGPL offers "no way of competing" with the copyright holder; writing features that are not present in any version would be an obvious starting point. (You also grossly misrepresent the market for "network effects", but that's somewhat tangential)
A quick Google returned nothing obviously interesting (except this very discussion as result #2).
I don't know whether it's actually true, but I find it surprising. It sounds like Black Duck Software runs some weird web crawler that collects license data continuously.