iPhone restricts users, GPLv3 frees them

[Patrick Coskren]

On Tuesday, July 03, 2007, at 11:36AM, "Jean-Christophe Helary" <fusion at mx6.tiki.ne.jp> wrote:
>
>On 4 juil. 07, at 00:26, Patrick Coskren wrote:
>
>> The GPL is an open source license, but it is not, in any way, about  
>> freedom.
>
>It is freedom to access the code. There are no other ways to put that.

Sure there are. In fact "freedom to access the code" is an extremely slanted way to put it.

Let's say I loan a friend a car, and tell him, "you can use this to drive to work, but don't take it out after 6PM".  Sure, in a sense I've given him "freedom to drive to work", but that's an odd way to characterize it.  I'm letting him use the car with certain restrictions.  Fair, and nobody's going to fault me for it, but Im hardly increasing anybody's freedom.

A better way to phrase the issue is that the GPL restricts use of the code in order to ensure it remains freely accessible by all.  But not freely usable.  So let's not pretend this is about freedom, is all I'm saying.  It's just a particular set of restrictions with particular goals.  If they'd just be up-front about that, and cut the self-righteousness and propaganda, I'd have no problem.

(I'm assuming you meant to copy the list, since your reply is solely relevant to the discussion rather than anything personal we were discussing, so I've re-copied them.  I apologize if this was in error.)

-Patrick