[Discuss] licensing: who freakin cares?

IngeGNUe ingegnue at riseup.net
Sun Apr 10 12:55:38 EDT 2016


On 04/09/16 21:59, Rich Pieri wrote:
> On 4/9/2016 4:14 PM, Eric Chadbourne wrote:
>> I bet most of you really don't care.  I know most non-tech humans
>> couldn't care less.
> 
> True. They want their kit to work. That's usually the highest priority,
> although the tolerance for bugs and crashes has long since become
> disturbing to me.
> 
> Second highest is that their kit interoperates with their co-workers'
> and cow-orkers' kits, their friends' and family members' kits and so forth.
> 
> Heck, most tech humans want these things, too.
> 
> The reason why I think you are mistaken about not caring about the
> license is that RMS and his closest adherents believe that these cares
> are irrelevant. I have RMS on record stating that free (as in FSF)
> software that does not work is superior to proprietary software. I have
> RMS on record stating that he cannot impose discipline on volunteer
> coders, that he cannot enforce QA/QC practices on GNU software
> developers, because doing so would violate their freedoms.
> 
> Think about it. Think about what the world would be like if all of the
> software we use was up to these standards of no coding discipline, no
> quality assurance. Think about all of the machines and devices in our
> lives with computers embedded in them. Think about them running software
> that has never been verified & validated for these uses. Think about
> them running software that has never been tested beyond compiling
> without errors and not immediately core dumping on start. This is the
> world that RMS wants to bring about, and every time you apply the GPL to
> your own work you bring the world one step closer.
> 
> I care about licensing because I don't want RMS's "users' utopia" to
> come to pass.
> 

Describing people as RMS "adherents" because they like the GPL and ideas
behind it (implying that they fully agree with the words and actions of
some bearded guy) is erasing their autonomy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisoning_the_well

Software freedom movement needs to grow up.



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