iPhone restricts users, GPLv3 frees them

[Charlton Wilbur]

On Jul 1, 2007, at 4:32 PM, LuKreme wrote:

>> Honestly, there needs to be a GPL-nutters mailing list.
>
> You know, that';s not helping.  I'm not a GPL nutter.

When you say things like "Without the GPL, there would be no open  
source licenses now," you sound like a GPL nutter, or at least  
someone who's been fed very biased information by a variety of GPL  
nutters.

> I've never really cared one way or the other.  I know there are  
> other licenses out there, but I also know that before GNU it was  
> pretty hard to get code. Maybe you had a much better OSS  
> experience.  If so, you were probably part of some institution that  
> had resources as opposed to a neophyte unix dweeb who dreamed one  
> day of being elevated to geek status.

Before the GPL, it was pretty hard to get code.  Before the Internet  
became widespread, it was pretty hard to get code.  Before the BSD  
license, it was pretty hard to get code.   All of these things  
started in the early 80s and reached critical mass in the early  
1990s.  The GPL no more *caused* open source than the BSD license  
did; they were both part of the same movement, that arose for the  
same reasons; the difference is that Stallman was rather more  
strident and had a rather more ideological take on the whole thing.

You were most likely aware of the GPL and of GNU software before you  
were aware of the BSD license, because the GNU project released  
things piecemeal and had no IP encumbrances for ideological reasons  
(and this is a *good* thing, or we'd still be waiting for Stallman to  
get around to the Hurd), while the BSD project released everything as  
a unit and had to tangle with AT&T before everything got done.  But  
this does not mean that the existence of the GPL and the GNU project  
*caused* the existence of the BSD license and the BSD project, or the  
existence of the Artistic License and Perl, which is what you claimed  
and what people objected to.  In particular, the record shows that  
the BSD project was underway and the Berkeley license were in use  
*before* Stallman started the GNU project and wrote the Emacs Public  
License; it seems foolish to claim that the Berkeley license would  
have retroactively ceased to exist, and the BSD project retroactively  
ceased to have ever begun, if Stallman had not written his license.

Charlton





-- 
Charlton Wilbur
cwilbur at gmail.com
cwilbur at chromatico.net