[Discuss] Profiting from GPL software

[smallm at SDF.ORG (Mike Small)]

On Tue, Nov 10, 2015 at 02:09:06PM -0500, Rich Pieri wrote:
> On 11/10/2015 12:46 PM, Mike Small wrote:
> >In fact if you look at their website you'd never know it's free software:
> >http://www.pdfforge.org/
> 
> We must be looking at different sites because the one I see is seems very
> enthusiastic about PDFCreator being AGPL, free to use, free forever, drink
> the Kool-Aid, etc.

Over on the "free forever" tab? Yeah, I didn't look very closely at the
site today. I was going by my memory of actually needing to look at
their source code and it not being at all obvious where to find it:

"PDFCreator is Open Source software and licensed under the terms of the
Affero General Public License (AGPL) to give you the maximum freedom"

Heh, they make it sound like putting it under AGPL was their idea. 

Here's an interview with the Ghostscript author. It's interesting in
that for a time he had it under the AFPL (the Alladin Free Public
License) before choosing the Affero GPL.  Alladin's license actually
did, explicitly, prevent commercial products other than the copyright
holder's from profiting from the software.

https://web.archive.org/web/20001218045900/http://devlinux.org/deutsch-interview.html#sec18

His views on free software are (were?) slightly different from the FSF's.
For instance:

"The GPL takes the point of view that it rewards cooperation by making
the work done cooperatively available freely to anyone who is willing to
play by those rules, but it does not draw a hard line that prevents that
work from also being used in a way that makes money for other people who
weren't involved in its creation." 

For fair context I should quote how he prefaced that:

"I'm going to compare the GNU license and the Aladdin license in a
way that is a little unfair to the GNU license."

I like his term "cooperative software." This way of thinking solves
for me the trouble I sometimes have to keep my positive feelings
for copyleft while being constantly exposed to the sometimes vitriolic 
anti-copyleft sentiment over in the BSD lists.  But perhaps it
sounds too left wing to be tactically sound for the FSF to adopt.
And then they'd have to change their acronym, among other things.