October 14th, 2024 Richard Stallman (aka “RMS”) is the founder of GNU and the Free Software Foundation and present-day voting member of the Free Software Foundation (FSF) board of directors and “Chief GNUisance” of the GNU project. He is responsible for innumerable contributions to the free software movement, setting its guiding principles, organizing political action, and directly contributing to a flourishing free software ecosystem. The majority of Stallman’s political activity has been of priceless value to society at large.
I catch a lot of shit for my distaste of GPL. I don’t think I should be able to tell you what you can and can’t do with my source code. I’ve released it into the wild. If I put caveats on it it’s not really free.
While I understand where you’re coming from, I believe that it distracts from a massive positive effect that the GPL has: the way it ensures collaboration. Lots of contributors to GPL software do so in the knowledge that they are working on something great together. I myself have felt discouraged to contribute to MIT licensed software, because I know that others might just take all the hard work, make something proprietary of it and give nothing back.
I see GPL as some sort of public transaction, it is indeed more limiting than MIT and offers less pure freedom in that sense. But I just love how it uses copyright not for enforcing licensing payment for some private entity, but enforces a contribution to the community as a whole. I find this quite beautiful.
I agree with you 100%, no exceptions. Strongly agree. I say the GPL is socialist. What those people don’t consider is that there are many countries in the world where no court will take a case over a software license.
The ISC license is a libertarian license.
Tell me your opinion on one thing. I’ve considered that if Torvalds changes the license to AGPLv3, meaning servers have to publish their source code, it would an extremely quick collapse and abandonment of Linux. The GPLv2 Linux kernel can have binary code in it, but a AGPLv3 must be 100% open source, and Google would ban Linux on all corporate systems, Microsoft would ban it, CISCO would ban it, IBM would ban it, a complete implosion. What do you say?
But if all those corporations adopt one of the BSD’s operating systems, due to the BSD and ISC license, the corporations can ignore those licenses and develop on more complete, stable, secure, long term reliable system. Linux is a collection of various parts forced together. BSD is a complete operating system from a single couple of developers who all have commit access to every part of the system.
AGPL evolved out of people saying, “my SaaS application isn’t being distributed at all, it’s just living on my server, so I can use your copy-left software without releasing my source alterations, and not violate the (GPLv2) license, because the license is based on distribution”. If the Linux kernel itself went AGPL (which isn’t what AGPL is even for), it would mean that modifications of the kernel would have to be published by whoever is doing the modifications, even if that kernel was only being used in a SaaS capacity, but most companies aren’t modifying the kernel and then offering that modified software over the network, they’re just running software on top of the upstream kernel, and AGPL higher up in the chain doesn’t touch that software, just like the current Linux kernel GPL doesn’t automatically apply to some python code you run on your Linux server.
Android, Amazon Linux, and IOS (the Cisco one) would just not move to the AGPL kernel (since you can’t retroactively apply it to already-released kernels), and probably continue their own forks as totally separate as they already do.
But the 99% of companies who are just using stock Linux distros e.g. stock Ubuntu to run their SaaS applications wouldn’t be affected. It definitely would not see the use collapse overnight.
What is socialist about GPL?
Being forced to open source seems like a pyramid scheme. Better examples of socialist and libertarian politics are licenses like MIT or BSD. They embody use without damage.
Stallman seems to have a flawed understanding of hierarchy and power. He exhibits such in the infectious GPL and pedophillic political takes. I purposely avoid GPL or derivatives when considering libraries.
I say socialist because of forced redistribution of any code changes, nobody is allowed to keep any new development for themself to use.
The argument that GPL helps everybody to benefit equally and nobody can keep the code for themself, that’s what a socialist says for they government must take everybody’s money to help those in need, except now the ones who had the money previously have become needy themselves and the government has all f the money and it’s not helping anybody.
It safer for software developers to bad GPL to protect themselves from any troubles and develop on any other operating system where they can choose what code to share and what to keep secret.
Look at how well Sony has done with FreeBSD on Playatation 4 and 5 with the BSD license. The Playstation system stays proprietary but they send code to FreeBSD for any network and server issues. Maybe Sony refused Linux for PS4 due to GPL to protect company secrets.
You have a flawed understanding of socialism