this post was submitted on 14 Oct 2024
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Free and Open Source Software
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Stallman pushed false propaganda about BSD for ideological reasons because the BSD developers allow freedom of choice to let people do what they want with their own computers and BSD developers don't fight proprietary software, they simply don't allow it as part of each BSD base operating system. Stallman and his followers think they know better than UNIX developers which software everybody in the world should use.
It's because of his kind that I only support open source software and comdemn free software and the politics of free software. A whole complete BSD operating system is 100% open source compared to the generic Linux kernel. Why doesn't the Linux-libre develop their own drivers like BSD develop drivers and commision hardware companies for specs for the BSD's to write their own drivers?
I catch a lot of shit for my distaste of GPL. I don’t think I should be able to tell you what you can and can’t do with my source code. I’ve released it into the wild. If I put caveats on it it’s not really free.
While I understand where you're coming from, I believe that it distracts from a massive positive effect that the GPL has: the way it ensures collaboration. Lots of contributors to GPL software do so in the knowledge that they are working on something great together. I myself have felt discouraged to contribute to MIT licensed software, because I know that others might just take all the hard work, make something proprietary of it and give nothing back.
I see GPL as some sort of public transaction, it is indeed more limiting than MIT and offers less pure freedom in that sense. But I just love how it uses copyright not for enforcing licensing payment for some private entity, but enforces a contribution to the community as a whole. I find this quite beautiful.