[Liverpool] OtherOS-on-Linux or Linux-on-OtherOS? was "Multi-Boot Query"

[Daniel Hulme]

On Fri, Mar 20, 2009 at 02:46:42PM +0000, Simon Johnson wrote:
> If the FSF really believed this to be true, they'd license everything under
> BSD. If I take Emacs, make some modifications and then sell that without
> providing the source, the FSF definitely would care about that. Even though
> that "does not affect the FSF and that the FSF wouldn't know about without
> being told."

> This is incorrect too. In a world without copyright all software would have
> an effective license of BSD. I could take code from Emacs and put in to my
> own text editor and sell it as a commericial venture and there would  be
> nothing that anyone could do about it. The GPL would be unenforcable.

> You're right that the GPL creates an "in-group" of people who can freely
> distribute and modify the group's software. However, in order for this group
> to have an legal protection it requires strong copyright laws. This is the
> power of the GPL and basing the unit of value around the *source
> code*rather than the
> *binaries* is the innovation that created so much high quality software.
> 
> It's also worth noting that freedom-to-share is curtailed under GPL. You're
> only allowed to share provided you share the source code too.  Under BSD,
> your freedom to distribute is not curtailed in any way.

Everything you say above is true, but entirely unrelated to what I said.
For FSF, GPL is a weapon that turns copyright against itself: by using
the ability that copyright creates to impose restrictions on others, to
prevent the others who distribute and modify software from imposing
restrictions on everyone else.

from http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/pragmatic.html (Stallman):
> My work on free software is motivated by an idealistic goal: spreading
> freedom and cooperation. I want to encourage free software to spread,
> replacing proprietary software that forbids cooperation, and thus make
> our society better.
> 
> That's the basic reason why the GNU General Public License is written
> the way it is—as a copyleft. All code added to a GPL-covered program
> must be free software, even if it is put in a separate file. I make my
> code available for use in free software, and not for use in
> proprietary software, in order to encourage other people who write
> software to make it free as well. I figure that since proprietary
> software developers use copyright to stop us from sharing, we
> cooperators can use copyright to give other cooperators an advantage
> of their own: they can use our code.

from http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/freedom-or-copyright.html (Stallman
again):
> The same law which had formerly acted as a beneficial industrial
> regulation on publishers had become a restriction on the public it was
> meant to serve.

and a slightly more moderate view from one of his actual speeches
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/copyright-versus-community.html :
> Now what are some of the changes we might want to make in copyright
> law in order to adapt it to the situation that the public finds itself
> in? Well the extreme change might be to abolish copyright law but that
> isn't the only possible choice. There are various situations in which
> we could reduce the power of copyright without abolishing it entirely
> because there are various different actions that can be done with a
> copyright and there are various situations in which you might do them,
> and each of those is an independent question.

Whether FSF's efforts to avoid granting any more power to the publishers
are actually any use is clearly debatable, but that the purpose of GPL
is to encourage authors to share their work, and that Stallman (and the
rest of FSF, if you read their position papers carefully) believes
copyright has gone too far in restricting the rights of people in order
to prop up an outdated business model, are both matters of public
record.

-- 
"I tried snorting coke once, but the bubbles went right up my nose and I
knocked the glass over."   -- ‘Sordid Confessions of a Teenage Innocent’
http://surreal.istic.org/           Not much change out of three sigmas.
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