#RMS / #FSF
#RMS parting should be a golden opportunity for the community, and hopefully #FSF, to move the battle on Copyleft from a religious to a political ground.
Yes, RMS original ideas are what we fight for, but FSF seems to fail lately to realize the impact Copyleft would have on fair competition and public money in technology.
2020 battle on #FreeSoftware should have firm political grounds, and recognize #OpenSource, as marketed today, as the actual threat to people's Freedom.
#GAFAM love for permissive licenses is because it makes it very easy for them to invest large amount of money to produce proprietary forks and destroy the competition, which often includes the original author(s), when they resist being acqu-hired.
The new FSF should be confronting their political enemies, not let them in.
re: RMS / FSF
@danielinux Who's GAFAM?
(Full disclosure–I prefer permissive licenses myself, just because I don't want to lock down my code. But I'm not a fan of giant companies buying out little projects like that.)
re: RMS / FSF
clarification: this is not a campaign against permissive licenses. They are still useful for small, 'commodity', piece of code where copyleft makes less sense.
What is alarming is the tendency nowadays of using MIT/BSD licenses for bigger projects.
If you care about what you are writing, as a community or a company, big or small, you can take advantage from using GPL or LGPL! It makes so much harder for your competitors to "steal" your code and turn their back to you.
Permissive licenses make competition unfair because once Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook start investing in your project, you become the "fork".
If it took Microsoft 20+ years to take the steering wheel on linux, it was because of GPL and distributed copyright. Otherwise they could have just taken the code and/or bought the author.
re: #RMS / #FSF
re: #RMS / #FSF
then LGPL is what you are looking for! It makes it easy for other projects to integrate your code (as long as it appears as a separate entity) but protects our Freedom (and your code's "rights to exist", nowadays).
re: #RMS / #FSF
@portpupper @danielinux Affero GPL
re: #RMS / #FSF
You are absolutely right. A very important mention being forgotten. This shows my disconnection with 'cloud/web' projects.
If you are running services with your software, GPL/LGPL would only protecting your code when it gets distributed, but wouldn't prevent your lazy competitor to sell services based on a modified version.
As long as they are distributing services based on the software, they are not affected by copyleft if they don't distribute a binary version of the platform to their users.
GAFAM, especially Amazon, has found its way around GPL for cloud-based software used to provide custom services.
AGPL gets you covered, because it states clearly that providing services based on your AGPL-covered software implies redistributing any changes to the source code.
re: #RMS / #FSF
they lobby congress and are expert sources when interviewed in the media and such