Re: Bitkeeper outrage, old and new

[Rob Landley <landley@trommello.org>]

On Sunday 20 October 2002 21:42, Larry McVoy wrote:

> > The GPL forces people to respect others freedom to use a work so
> > covered.  That is still a power, but used in a good way.  The power
> > to silence criticism is definitely not a power that enhances anyones
> > freedom.
>
> Hogwash indeed.  Free means the freedom to do whatever you want.
> Consider the US free speech.  Nobody says "this sort of speech is good
> for the world, therefor it is the sanctioned form of free speech and
> all other forms are prohibited".

Actually, they do.  Commercial speech can be more heavily regulated than 
non-commercial speech, and then of course there's the old "obscenity" bit.  
And of course the test of yelling "movie" in a crowed firehouse... :)

There are several important supreme court cases on this, attempting to 
delineate the bounds of the first amendment.

> playing God.  The GPL is *not* about freedom it is about forcing the
> source code to be freely available.

The GPL is about giving free software an immune system so that Forker du jour 
can't hire all your developers away to work on a closed fork of the codebase 
the way netscape gutted Mosaic, BSDi shredded the berkeley CSRG, and the two 
Lisp companies drained the original MIT AI lab.

Technically speaking, the bill of rights is a list of restrictions.  Can't 
shut people up, can't take the guns away, can't impose a religion on 
people...

> And it does a fairly poor job of that

Seems to have worked fine so far. :)

> if it really wanted to do so it would be far more simplistic about
> it and say "any changes you make must be published within 24 hours or
> your license is revoked".

Wouldn't hold up in court, for a number of reasons.

> All you are doing is saying that your goals are better than other goals.

Stallman isn't saying you can't put your code under the license you like.  
He's not really addressing you.  (I think he's written you off as a lost 
cause.)  He was talking to the rest of the kernel development list and going 
"What are you, NUTS?  There be strings attached!"  And they went "So why 
doesn't the FSF sponsor a bitcreeper replacement?"  And he has studiously 
chosen to ignore this, it seems.  Either that or his inbox runneth over...

> That's not freedom, that is you deciding what is best for the world.
> You may well be right, your goals may be what is best for the world.
> None the less, that's not freedom.  That's Big Brother making decisions
> for all "the little people" in the world.

The same could be said about the founding fathers and the constitution...

>  And, surprise surprise, you
> may not be right.  Freedom is about everyone have equal rights to make
> their own choices, nobody died and elected you God.

If freedom is about everyone having equal rights, then if everybody is locked 
up in the same size cell, we're all free.  (In prison you get to make any 
choice you want.  Whether or not you can act on it is another matter, but 
that's a pragmetic concern wherever you go.  It's easy to choose how to spend 
a million dollars...)

The difference between the utopian ideal of putting all your code in the 
public domain and licensing it under the GPL, is that the GPL works and 
putting our code in the public domain means, under our legal system, people 
can sue you if your "hello world" fails to cure cancer for them.

Who are you to take away their freedom to sue you by putting clauses in your 
license forbidding it? :)

Rob