[Discuss] Profiting from GPL software

[greg at freephile.com (Greg Rundlett (freephile))]

On Thu, Nov 12, 2015 at 1:16 PM, Rich Pieri <richard.pieri at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 11/11/2015 10:02 PM, Robert Krawitz wrote:
> > Uh huh.  So that means that *you* have no rights to GPL'ed works
> > except for those that the authors assign under the GPL.  What's sauce
> > for the goose is sauce for the gander.
>
> Correct. I have no rights to your works except those which you
> explicitly grant to me and those provided by fair use. It's your work.
> You own it. You get to decide how it is distributed and how it is used.
>
> > The goal of the GPL is precisely to ensure the same rights to everyone.
>
> The goal of copyleft, and the GPL in particular, is to eliminate
> individual ownership of software. Couching this in terms of rights and
> freedoms, ethics and morals is just a way of making it sound like it
> isn't socialism.
>
>
Using terms like rights, freedoms, ethics and morals describes how it IS
socialism.  You are caught up in a world view where "Socialism" = bad and
rabid capitalism = ideal.  Socialism is sharing. In this country, they USED
TO teach that sharing is good (in kindergarten no less).  Not so much
anymore.  Some things are innately meant to be shared... especially things
which when shared produce more total benefit.  Especially things that are
intangible and have a zero cost of reproduction.  Things like math, and
law, and knowledge.

"Intellectual property" is an insidious term that attempts the impossible:
to draw boundaries around a persons individual brain cells, and confer the
rights to those brain cells to a different entity or limit the scope of
interaction of those brain cells.  In a world where everything and everyone
across all geo-political boundaries depends on software, it's pretty
obviously counterproductive to do anything but share the software.  This is
even more so when you consider that all software, like knowledge, is built
upon it's predecessors.  But sharing is not in the best interest of those
at the very top of the pyramid.  Fortunately, there are a few cultures in
the world that value sharing. Their influence is not dead. And there are
many in the U.S., likely inspired by the work of RMS, who value sharing and
openness (e.g. Creative Commons).

The thing that confuses me about software developers who espouse licenses
other than GPL is that they specifically grant others (companies) the right
to take from them, without any benefit whatsoever.  The BSD, MIT and Apache
style licenses are a corporate/hoarder's dream come true.  And the
billionaires have even found a way around the GPL: buy it.  Sun (Oracle)
paid $1 Billion for MySQL and although the software is still free, it will
be interesting to see what Oracle does with the licensing in 2016 when
their promise to dual-license runs out.  Fortunately, forks like MariaDB,
Percona and WebScaleSQL exist. Facebook, Google, LinkedIn and Twitter are
billionaires who are just as greedy as Oracle, but apparently are
interested in extracting their money elsewhere.

Greg 'freephile' Rundlett