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Came in here to say just that. Copyfree licenses, such as BSD, are what you should use if you want your code to be free and used for any purpose. GPL is what you want to use if you want to prevent commercial use of your code inside of another program. Or if you want to be an ass and make other copyfree things GPL/non commercial. It's the libertarianism vs communism of licensing.

(Yes, you can throw the argument of commercial GPL software out there. It exists, I know. And now you have cloud services as a result. Software as an internet service... thanks GNU!)

I'll try to buck the trend here by skipping the derision and offering constructive advice. ;-)

A single license that gives users access to the code but limits the ability to redistribute the code and distribute patches to the "core" is what we'd prefer.

In this case, the closest match I can come up with off the top of my head is to apply the Microsoft Reference Source License to the source code.

This is not a Free/Libre or Open source license, because the constraints you are looking for are in direct conflict with the Open Source Definition, clauses 1 and 3; the Copyfree Standard Definition, clauses 1 and 3; and the Free Software Definition, freedoms 2 and 3.

Do you expect that if you were to permit redistribution of the core and modifications to it that others in the community would completely take over the project and continue its development without your business's involvement (a 'fork', in development jargon)? That would be the primary reason I can think of for such a restriction.

To call restrictively licensed software (ex. GPL) "free" can only be described as Orwellian.

http://copyfree.org

--libman

I think of MINIX 3 as the leading genuinely-free alternative to GNU Hurd. Hurd's popularity is much smaller than that of Linux, but it provides an alternative kernel that does things differently: microkernel client-server design, minimalism, etc. Likewise, MINIX offers a different approach, and isn't really a direct competitor to the *BSD's. MINIX is for people who explicitly understand and value microkernels.

--libman

Just in case you're not a troll, just really misinformed and confused: almost every point you make is either an argument against a straw man, makes no sense or is simply based on false assumptions. I'll just pick a few examples:

I've been fighting this battle for many years now, regularly presenting significant amounts of evidence in favor of copyfree software. Calling me a "troll" is akin to calling Copernicus a "witch" for presenting evidence that Earth orbits the sun!

And then you go off to say that that's worse than making income (what exactly any of this has to do with income is anyone's guess) through legitimate contracts. Which are enforced by government force. Can you see how that argument makes no sense whatsoever?

Here you are exhibiting total ignorance of the subject matter. You need to study philosophy of law, as well as basic economics.

Making income is an accomplishment - it means you are providing something so valuable to other people that they are willing to compensate you for it. If someone else could provide the same or better value at same or lower price, the buyers would go there instead. Giving away software / code / etc that other people find useful and use is an accomplishment as well, and under certain circumstances it provides more benefits (attention, patches, donations, etc) than selling the software would have. Developers have a Right to choose how they distribute their code (and it is their own, added code that constitutes the value in question).

Freedom of contract is a Natural Right - meaning that we observe its necessity independently of whether it is recognized by any state. Contracts have existed since the dawn of civilization (ex. public oaths), and civilization is impossible without some way of holding people accountable for their promises. Contracts will continue to exist (and be insured and enforced by non-monopolistic DRO's) long after governments as you know them will rot away on the ash-heap of history.

Copyright, on the other hand, is a relatively recent invention of very dubious necessity. It started in the 1600s largely as a censorship mechanism, to suppress dissident literature and reward the loyal propagandists of the state. In spite of its sustained legislative approval, economic evidence for benefits of copyright remain very scarce, and much can be said as to its harm.

"Implicit contract" based EULA's and software licenses are more dubious still. They are completely different from real (explicit consent) contracts, and don't stand the slightest test of logical scrutiny. If GPL is legally valid, then so is any "fine print" attached to anything you may come across! How would you feel if you were to find a dollar bill on the street, put it in your wallet, and then get sued by me for not following the terms of the "license" scribbled on that bill, stating that your wallet now belongs to me?!

You seem to think that the GPL equates copying with theft. Where did you get this idea?

The fact that it drags people to court (which can cost them hundreds of thousands of dollars) for mere copying. And:

"Microsoft and Apple can't steal parts of the code and use it in their OSes legally." -- RedHackTea

That would be a great argument against using the GPL. That is, if the GPL indeed had something to say about how software can and can't be used. Which it doesn't.

Modification is a form of

Copyleft-only languages have no chance, particularly among languages intended to be embedded in applications. Permissively licensed alternatives to Guile among Scheme implementations seem to include: Gauche, Ypsilon, TinyScheme, Scheme 48, Owl, and the SCheme SHell (scsh).

And of course Scheme itself is dwarfed, in terms of both popularity and performance by other languages. Haskell seems to be the best overall functional language at the moment, and, when choosing a scripting / macro-language without a commitment to functional languages, better alternatives would be Lua (made faster than Scheme by LuaJIT), JavaScript / CoffeeScript (V8), and Ruby (Topaz).

--libman

Microsoft (and Apple, Oracle, etc) takes nothing away from FLOSS software, it merely competes with it. Sometimes it wins, sometimes it loses. It most often wins in market segments where FLOSS was/is seriously lacking, like n00b-friendly GUI apps, software for sweet ol' secretary ladies who've barely learned to point and click, and of course games. (True, sometimes it coasts on the momentum of past accomplishments, but this momentum cannot last more than a few years.)

Microsoft's software makes millions of people more productive (or more entertained / happier) than they would have been without it, providing value for value. This injects money and jobs into the IT sector, some of which in turn goes to FLOSS, or the salaries of people who also contribute to FLOSS, etc. FLOSS benefits tremendously from proprietary software that got ahead of it, learning both from its innovations and its mistakes. In time FLOSS software catches up in a particular market segment, and Microsoft moves on to something else.

If what you hate is "intellectual property", then Microsoft should be on the very bottom of your "enemies list", since a large and growing part of their products are not hinged on mere IP and EULA ("implicit contracts"), but operate through far more legitimate means: explicit business / education / certification / support contracts, hardware bundling, SaaS and other services, etc. Compare this to Copyleft, which is entirely dependent on IP to be enforceable. The only software that is completely free from IP is Copyfree ("permissive" / "don't sue, don't plagiarize" licensed software) or "Public Domain".

--libman

Who needs this? Why?

Who prints to dead trees these days?

Better to use the modern Web stack instead.

WebKit / Chromium has an almost-entirely-copyfree implementation of HTML5, SVG, MathML, etc.

For an easier syntax there are things like Markdown.

For ye olde UNIX man pages, there's now mandoc.

--libman

I cannot use this GPLv3 add-on to a GPLv3 editor.

A few years ago I whined that there are no good text editors / IDE's out there with a genuine free software license - only ye olde nvi, mg (tiny emacs clone), and a few Windows/Mac-only and SlowScriptKiddyLanguage-based options... The situation remains unchanged today.

My attempt to convince the vim lead developer to relicense (so that *BSD OS'es could include it in base) has led nowhere... I guess he thinks Evil Microsoft wants to "steal" vim code for Visual Studio 2015 ::rolleyes::...

A zillion editors out there, and all of them bundled with unethical anti-market legal threats...

Very depressing...

--libman

Being a copyfree zealot, I haven't used Macromedia / Adobe Flash in years. I'm missing out on many Web annoyances, and on very little good. I still get access to all the videos I want via youtube-dl (or my own buggy little equivalent thereof) or BitTorrent - either of which can be used to download Khan Academy videos (an example mentioned above).

Hoping HTML5+ video and something like NaCl will dominate.

--libman

GPL is too restrictive. It should not be called "free software" by any rational definition of the term. Oracle retains far too much control. Languages that don't have a genuinely free implementation (Java, C#/VB, Perl, Ada, etc) should be avoided.

(Yes, same "--libman" (obviously excluding comment #42769199 - a second false-positive for my indexing script to ignore...)... Biased GNUtards will abuse their mod powers to limit me to 2 posts per day, which I why I post as "AC".)

I was specifically criticizing Java for things other than security.

First of all, it's not genuinely free software. A freer alternative implementation, Apache Harmony, was killed off by patents. Why marry a language when there are limits, both practical and theoretical, to what you can do with it? Some of Java's security problems are directly related to Java's relative closedness and bad will with the hacker community.

Secondly, it fails both as a high-productivity language and as a high-performance / systems language. People could always build better software more productively by using a scripting language like Python or Ruby, and then rewriting performance-critical modules in C. Unfortunately Ousterhout's Dichotomy never caught on in large bureaucracies, the excuse being that they wanted one language for a balance of productivity and performance, which, with enough statistical torture, Java could be shown to be. Until recently.

Many things have changed in the last decade to make real (compiled to machine code) programming languages competitive with bytecode VM's: better platform-independent build tools, faster compilers (plus network distributed compiling), sandboxing / OS-level virtualization, etc. We've had languages like D, Go, and now Rust that would offer better productivity than Java, and should in theory eventually come closer to the performance of C. (Haskell sucks.) And the language that in my opinion currently does the best job, both in terms of syntax and performance, is Nimrod.

--libman

mplayer links to 95% of these as well.

"95%" is a ridiculous guess, but that's not what's important - what's important is whether those dependencies are feature-optional.

XBMC with all `make config` options disabled:

        `make run-depends-list -C /usr/ports/multimedia/xbmc | wc -l` => 51

        `make build-depends-list -C /usr/ports/multimedia/xbmc | wc -l` => 60

Mplayer as I use it to play anything and everything (with the following `make config` options enabled: RTCPU, OCFLAGS, X11, X11XV, THEORA, VPX, WIN32):

        `make run-depends-list -C /usr/ports/multimedia/mplayer | wc -l` => 8

        `make build-depends-list -C /usr/ports/multimedia/mplayer | wc -l` => 9

Mplayer runs without perl / python / tcl / bash, without any gnome stuff, etc. On Gentoo Linux (my favorite Linux distro before I went all BSD) it can even run on the framebuffer, with no X! I can understand why a media center might want to optionally support any number of plug-in scripting languages, database backends, GNOME desktop integration, network protocols (ex. SAMBA), etc - but making all of them mandatory is just bloat!

it is also very hard to see what makes us not be free software according to your definitions.

I said it's not " genuinely free", with the link explaining what I mean by "genuine" - but only in passing (see above).

the fact that you compare a media center to a mere command line player tells me you are barking up a tree you have never climbed.

First of all, mplayer is not "a mere command line player", it is a modular piece of software. It can be used with a GUI front-end or inside a Web browser. It can run as a daemon and be controlled by another application, like one that shows a touchscreen / mouse / LIRC menu, or takes voice commands, or Kinect input, or whatever else.

Secondly, comparing mplayer to XBMC is like comparing a UNIX system to a caricature of a "fully loaded" Windows PC that won't let you uninstall anything. Some trees are not worth climbing.

--

I think that in-browser video is the future, but note that "in-browser" doesn't necessarily mean "online". (Also future browser input device possibilities will be vastly greater than today. Most people will watch movies by sitting on a couch / armchair / recliner in front of a wall-sized screen, but how they control it will be up to them: voice commands, gesture recognition, flexible touch-pads on their couches or clothes, wearable type-on-air finger motion capture, etc, etc, etc. Stay tuned for HTML6, 7, etc...)

Examples of Web Apps that present video would include: whitelisted BitTorrent Web-sites that integrate with a BT download daemon running on your computer, a local RSS downloader daemon with a Web interface (like an in-browser alternative to Miro), an "/index.html6" on removable media, etc. Mplayer can still be a useful component for those apps (ex. launched full-screen by a client-side daemon that is controlled from the browser with a WebSockets API), until HTML5+ video makes it entirely obsolete. XBMC, on the other hand, is just The Wrong Way To Do It.

--libman

Recommended reading: Copyfree is not quite the Public Domain .

In the ideal world there would be no problems with releasing software without any legal notice, or explicitly as "public domain". The present-day legal systems, however, are very far from ideal. Some governments don't recognize the concept of "public domain", and the developers / users of such software can run into all sorts of difficulties with the way their businesses are regulated. Some governments also have certain silly "implicit warranty" laws: if you give away software and that software eats someone's data (or has security holes, or any other issue), they may be able to sue you!

Many businesses (especially small businesses / independent developers) cannot understand all the details of how this would affect them without paying for a legal consultation ahead of time, which results in a significant "chilling effect". People avoid software that presents legal ambiguities, which applies not just to "public domain" software but to GPL and other long-winded restrictive licenses.

A clear solution to this is to only use copyfree licenses, like the new BSD license, MIT/X, ISC, CC0, OWL, etc. These licenses essentially say: "do what you want, just don't sue me, and don't pretend you wrote it". That's the very essence of free software! Attaching further restrictions, even when well-intentioned, always does more harm than good. The gradual success of copyfree software is powerful evidence that copyleft restrictions are not necessary, and there is much evidence of them causing a great deal of harm.

I highly recommend for everyone to listen to this interview with D Richard Hipp (bsd-talk podcast #194). He is the author of SQLite, which is one of the most widely-used pieces of software ever developed! In that interview he talks about why he chose to release his latest project under the BSD license. Hipp tells of his attempt to give away SQLite as "public domain", and how some governments make even that seemingly simple prospect very inconvenient. He also mentions how SQLite was originally forced into GPL for dependency issues, and how inconvenient that was - he had to rewrite those components from scratch in order to make his software useful...

--libman

Recommended reading: Copyfree is not quite the Public Domain .

In the ideal world there would be no problems with releasing software without any legal notice, or explicitly as "public domain". The present-day legal systems, however, are very far from ideal. Some governments don't recognize the concept of "public domain", and the developers / users of such software can run into all sorts of difficulties with the way their businesses are regulated. Some governments also have certain silly "implicit warranty" laws: if you give away software and that software eats someone's data (or has security holes, or any other issue), they may be able to sue you!

Many businesses (especially small businesses / independent developers) cannot understand all the details of how this would affect them without paying for a legal consultation ahead of time, which results in a significant "chilling effect". People avoid software that presents legal ambiguities, which applies not just to "public domain" software but to GPL and other long-winded restrictive licenses.

A clear solution to this is to only use copyfree licenses, like the new BSD license, MIT/X, ISC, CC0, OWL, etc. These licenses essentially say: "do what you want, just don't sue me, and don't pretend you wrote it". That's the very essence of free software! Attaching further restrictions, even when well-intentioned, always does more harm than good. The gradual success of copyfree software is powerful evidence that copyleft restrictions are not necessary, and there is much evidence of them causing a great deal of harm.

I highly recommend for everyone to listen to this interview with D Richard Hipp (bsd-talk podcast #194). He is the author of SQLite, which is one of the most widely-used pieces of software ever developed! In that interview he talks about why he chose to release his latest project under the BSD license. Hipp tells of his attempt to give away SQLite as "public domain", and how some governments make even that seemingly simple prospect very inconvenient. He also mentions how SQLite was originally forced into GPL for dependency issues, and how inconvenient that was - he had to rewrite those components from scratch in order to make his software useful...

--libman

When choosing a programming language, which inevitably requires a high level of commitment, serious developers and contributors take licensing freedom into consideration. Perl's artsy-fartsy license is not copyfree, and much of CPAN is downright GPL. This gave perl's competitors a definite advantage (especially after Ruby switched to BSD). Why marry a language that comes bundled with legal threats, that you can't embed into your app, and that will require hours of legal study to figure out what else you cannot do?

FreeBSD was right to boot perl out of their base system, and I'm looking forward to when other UNIXen will do the same.

--libman

There is no genuinely free media player currently available, but from the options that are available, XBMC seems like a far more bloated option compared to good old mplayer.

Just look at the dependencies for the XBMC port on FreeBSD (`make pretty-print-run-depends-list pretty-print-build-depends-list -C /usr/ports/multimedia/xbmc`, with all `make config` flags disabled):

This port requires package(s) "aalib-1.4.r5_6 atk-2.0.1 avahi-app-0.6.29_3 bitstream-vera-1.10_5 boost-libs-1.48.0_2 ca_root_nss-3.14.1 cairo-1.10.2_5,2 cdparanoia-3.9.8_9 compositeproto-0.4.2 consolekit-0.4.3 curl-7.24.0_1 damageproto-1.2.1 dbus-1.4.14_4 dbus-glib-0.94 dmidecode-2.11 dri2proto-2.6 eggdbus-0.6_1 enca-1.13 encodings-1.0.4,1 expat-2.0.1_2 fixesproto-5.0 flac-1.2.1_3 font-bh-ttf-1.0.3 font-misc-ethiopic-1.0.3 font-misc-meltho-1.0.3 font-util-1.2.0 fontconfig-2.9.0,1 freeglut-2.8.0 freetype2-2.4.11 fribidi-0.19.2_1 gamin-0.1.10_4 gdbm-1.9.1 gdk-pixbuf-2.23.5_3 gettext-0.18.1.1 gio-fam-backend-2.28.8_1 glew-1.9.0 glib-2.28.8_5 gnome_subr-1.0 gobject-introspection-0.10.8_3 gtk-update-icon-cache-2.24.6_1 hal-0.5.14_20 hicolor-icon-theme-0.12 icu-50.1.1 inputproto-2.0.2 jasper-1.900.1_10 jbigkit-1.6 jpeg-8_4 kbproto-1.0.5 lame-3.99.5 lcms-1.19_1,1 libGL-7.6.1_2 libGLU-7.6.1_1 libICE-1.0.7,1 libSM-1.2.0,1 libX11-1.4.4,1 libXau-1.0.6 libXcomposite-0.4.3,1 libXcursor-1.1.12 libXdamage-1.1.3 libXdmcp-1.1.0 libXext-1.3.0_1,1 libXfixes-5.0 libXft-2.1.14 libXi-1.4.5,1 libXinerama-1.1.1,1 libXmu-1.1.0,1 libXp-1.0.1,1 libXrandr-1.3.2 libXrender-0.9.6 libXt-1.1.1,1 libXtst-1.2.0 libXxf86dga-1.1.2 libXxf86vm-1.1.1 libaacs-0.3.0 libass-0.10.1 libbluray-0.2.2,1 libcddb-1.3.2_1 libcdio-0.83_1 libdaemon-0.14 libdrm-2.4.17_1 libexecinfo-1.1_3 libffi-3.0.11 libfontenc-1.1.0 libgcrypt-1.5.0_1 libgpg-error-1.10 libiconv-1.14 libltdl-2.4.2 libmad-0.15.1b_2 libmicrohttpd-0.9.23 libmodplug-0.8.8.4 libmpeg2-0.5.1_1 libogg-1.3.0,4 libpciaccess-0.12.1 libplist-1.8 libpthread-stubs-0.3_3 libsamplerate-0.1.8_3 libsndfile-1.0.25_2 libssh-0.5.2 libvolume_id-0.81.1 libvorbis-1.3.3_1,3 libxcb-1.7 libxml2-2.7.8_5 lzo2-2.06 mesa-demos-7.6.1_1 mkfontdir-1.0.6 mkfontscale-1.0.9 mysql-client-5.5.29 ncurses-5.9_1 p5-Unicode-Map8-0.13 p5-Unicode-String-2.09 pango-1.28.4_1 pciids-20121208 pcre-8.32 perl-5.14.2_2 pixman-0.24.2 pkgconf-0.8.9 png-1.5.14 policykit-0.9_6 polkit-0.99 popt-1.16 printproto-1.0.5 py27-imaging-1.1.7_1 py27-sqlite3-2.7.3_2 py27-tkinter-2.7.3_3 python27-2.7.3_6 randrproto-1.3.2 recode-3.6_8 recordproto-1.14.1 renderproto-0.11.1 rtmpdump-2.4_1 samba34-libsmbclient-3.4.17 sdl-1.2.15_2,2 sdl_image-1.2.12_1 shared-mime-info-1.0_2 sqlite3-3.7.14.1 taglib-1.8 talloc-2.0.7 tcl-8.5.13 tcl-modules-8.5.13 tiff-4.0.3 tinyxml-2.6.2_1 tk-8.5.13 xcb-util-0.3.9_1,1 xcb-util-renderutil-0.3.8 xdpyinfo-1.3.0 xextproto-7.2.0 xf86dgaproto-2.1 xf86vidmodeproto-2.3.1 xineramaproto-1.2.1 xorg-fonts-truetype-7.5.1 xproto-7.0.22 yajl-2.0.4_1" to run.

This port requires package(s) "aalib-1.4.r5_6 atk-2.0.1 autoconf-2.69 autoconf-wrapper-20101119 automake-1.12.6 automake-wrapper-20101119 avahi-app-0.6.29_3 bitstream-vera-1.10_5 boost-libs-1.48.0_2 ca_root_nss-3.14.1 cairo-1.10.2_5,2 cdparanoia-3.9.8_9 cmake-2.8.9 cmake-modules-2.8.9 compositeproto-0.4.2 consolekit-0.4.3 cups-client-1.5.4 curl-7.24.0_1 damageproto-1.2.1 dbus-1.4.14_4 dbus-glib-0.94 dejavu-2.33 dmidecode-2.11 dri2proto-2.6 eggdbus-0.6_1 enca-1.13 encodings-1.0.4,1 expat-2.0.1_2 fixesproto-5.0 flac-1.2.1_3 font-bh-ttf-1.0.3 font-misc-ethiopic-1.0.3 font-misc-meltho-1.0.3 font-util-1.2.0 fontconfig-2.9.0,1 freetype2-2.4.11 fribidi-0.19.2_1 gamin-0.1.10_4 gawk-4.0.2 gdbm-1.9.1 gdk-pixbuf-2.23.5_3 gettext-0.18.1.1 gio-fam-backend-2.28.8_1 glew-1.9.0 glib-2.28.8_5 gmake-3.82_1 gnome_subr-1.0 gobject-introspection-0.10.8_3 gperf-3.0.3 gtk-2.24.6_2 gtk-update-icon-cache-2.24.6_1 hal-0.5.14_20 hicolor-icon-theme-0.12 icu-50.1.1 inputproto-2.0.2 jasper-1.900.1_10 java-zoneinfo-2012.j javavmwrapper-2.4_3 jbigkit-1.6 jpeg-8_4 kbproto-1.0.5 lame-3.99.5 lib

good to know that Google values our privacy so much.

It doesn't. But it exists in a competitive marketplace, which proportionately forces it to provide people what they value.

This includes both end-users and developers, as Chromium is the most free major Web browser existence.

If Google doesn't provide a certain feature (boosting its own PR in the process), then a competing browser or an add-on or a fork will.

--libman

I hope that 2013 will finally be the year of the *BSD desktop! :-)

I understand you were joking, but...

What is more likely to happen is "a year of web apps", as they become viable and replace many desktop widget-based apps, from autocad to miro to zsnes. I know that web apps currently have a reputation for closedness and bad usability, but that can change in the coming year(s). Advancements that will make it possible include HTML5+ (beyond what's already available), related audio/video standards, client-side DB API, Web-specific GPU acceleration, faster and better client-side scripting languages, and perhaps something like NaCl for fast sandboxed binaries.

Since there are standardized (mostly)copyfree multi-platform browser implementations, this would benefit everyone, from UNIX to Windows to AmigaOS to HaikuOS users. And it will particularly benefit "genuinely free software" puritans like myself, as GTK / Qt / SWT / wx / etc (and most projects based on top of them) are not copyfree.

Of course relying on remote apps has its downsides, but specific free software standards can be developed: copyfree server-side code, copyfree unobfuscated client-side code, copyfree databases, and tools to simplify copying / syncing an app from a remote server to your local PC / network. There can be free'n'open common UI and usability guidelines for Web Apps as well.

--libman

I'm hoping that DragonFly BSD's HAMMER FS, when it's ready, will be ported to FreeBSD, and then to all other OS'es. It already has some advantages over ZFS, like reduced memory requirements, and is planning to add a lot of additional features (ex. clustering) in the near future.

By the virtue of its copyfree license, HAMMER can spread like wildfire to all OS'es, including proprietary and copyleft ones! Imagine never having to convert your home partition, and always having optimal FS features and performance, as you switch from OS to OS to OS!

--libman

Your post is full of inaccuracies and wild, unsubstantiated prophecies.

Name one inaccuracy.

As for the "prophecies" - they are merely projections of the existing trends. Do you dispute the statistics of licensing preferences in recent projects? Do you dispute that the once-unassailable GPL market share is almost entirely diminished amongst the most competitive software segments (ex. scripting languages)? Do you dispute that ye olde MySQL is losing FLOSS market share to PostgreSQL, SQLite, Redis, Memcached, etc? And do you honestly believe that Linux will be the final word in OS design for all eternity?!

I'll tell you something, Mr $hill;

I am the polar opposite of a "shill" - a person who quit his corporate job and chose to live in dire poverty to maintain his integrity. But that is something you probably wouldn't understand.

Google would not exist without Linux, MySQL, GCC, Python and a host of similar technologies.

You could get all the way to the moon with that leap of logic!

First, a lesser point... Google was started in 1996 - a full two years after FreeBSD was free of the AT&T lawsuit FUD. PostgreSQL was available as well. If Python isn't copyFREE enough for ya, then purer alternatives like Tcl have already been available. GCC was indeed difficult to avoid (if you're fanatical about botcotting proprietary software, which Google obviously was not).

What is far more significant is that, in absence of Stallmanesque copyLEFT fanaticism, all the energies of free software would have gone to copyFREE projects instead. There would have been a copyFREE compiler collection better than GCC a lot sooner if GCC had never existed, and the same applies to every other software package category as well.

Why is it they did not select BSD for their giant server farms?

As I've already explained a dozen times, it was because Linux always had advantages over FreeBSD that compensated for the disadvantage of a copyLEFT license. First it was the fact that FreeBSD was entangled in legal FUD until 1994 (and it didn't become fully copyFREE until 1999). Linux went viral in 1993, and had better developers and progressively better and better features than BSD did. Many companies had used FreeBSD on their "giant server farms" (ex. Yahoo), but it is fully understandable why Google went with Linux instead. Boosted by its popularity, Linux went further and further ahead in a positive-feedback cycle of ever-more features, ever-more contributors, and ever-more corporate support.

There is a lot to be said about extreme positions of RMS, but it is also true that the success of Google, Facebook and Apple is firmly based on GNU stuff such as GCC (which Apple used for a very long time).

The success of many companies is partially based on gratis software - which saved them a little bit of money. (Freedom is a crucial value, at least to me, but one that is separate from "success".) The quantity, quality, and legally-unrestricted utility of FLOSS software available to them would have been greater if copyLEFT had never existed.

Software isn't powered by RMS's ideology, it is powered by the talents of the developers. Giving RMS credit for all GPL-licensed software is like giving Hitler credit for all rocketry!

I think you are in the pay of M$ and you shit into your pants about the phenomenal success of GNU software and you would like everybody to adopt BSD licenses as that would allow your egotist desire to rake in $$$ to succeed in the SHORT term. On the long run, it would damage the whole IT indust

You are right about Stallman's extreme Leftist views

I try to avoid the irrational left-vs-right "wing" terminology. It originated as a schism within the socialist movement, with those seated on the "right" of some historical deliberative body being "nationalist socialists", and those on the "left" being "internationalist socialists". I reject them both.

One possible exception may be when I'm highlighting the distinction between copyLEFT and copyFREE with upper casing, just as a reading aid (unless I forget). The former is an application of copyright that stands for a particular political special-interest group, while the latter stands for freedom.

and being familiar w/ your link,

By this do you mean the the thread on the Free State Project forum?

I'm not sure why you say that he attacks bad people.

I think you've misunderstood me. I was saying that Stallman is often attacked by other people for all the wrong reasons - and not for the right reasons to be severely critical of him.

Personal attacks against Stallman are often focused on his lifestyle choices, and I think those attacks are often irrational. Hippies are a-OK, as long as they don't initiate aggression (i.e. socialist politics) against others. Even voluntary communists are OK (even though their philosophy is so dysfunctional it is almost never practiced voluntarily). I can respect lispy emacs users, even though I reject GNU Emacs and its license. I can agree with some of Stallman's software design ideas, while disagreeing with others.

What is irreconcilable between me and Stallman is that he believes in using government-veiled violence to get his way, and I refuse to recognize that violence as legitimate.

In the Mid East, w/o saying so in so many words, he backs Jihad terror groups against Israel.

I am rather critical of Israel myself (although I do recognize its accomplishments as warranted). Israel could have been established without violating the Property Rights of the Palestinians... But that's a whole nother debate...

And his views on pedophilia and necrophilia - how on earth can anyone consider that mainstream?

Actually those are some of the issues where Stallman is mostly right (except he'd probably fail to fully recognize Parents' Rights in regard to the former). Pedophilia is clearly an illness, and its indulgence is clearly unethical, but it doesn't constitute rape in every single case. The hysteria over "kiddy porn" is probably the #1 threat to Internet freedom that exists today!

The choice of whether to program in C, C++, Objective-C, Objective-C++, C#, Java or whatever should be a decision of individual programmers, since the FSF is not a company. [...]

A group doesn't need to be "a company" (presumably you mean like with salaried employees) in order to have working standards. There's great usefulness to organizations that set policies for the projects that they accept under their umbrella, as long as people are free to fork off on their own if they so choose. We can have the best of both worlds - rational order as well as freedom. There's nothing wrong with having large "cathedrals", as long as there's a "bazaar" of competition between them.

I myself firmly believe that having every component written in a different language is horrendously ugly! I'm a big fan of all UNIX systems programming taking place in C, and brand new future-oriented "post-POSIX" OS projects starti

The TIOBE language popularity index says Ada is holding steady in 16th place - actually up from 24th place 5 years ago, but down from being the second most popular language (after C) 25 years ago.

According to The Great Programming Language ShootOut (recently renamed to The Benchmarks Game), Ada is almost as fast as C (then again, so are Pascal and Fortran), but it's also the most verbose language in the comparison!

Unsurprising, given how much them lazy overpaid government contract moochers hate efficiency...

Also note that there doesn't seem to be a genuinely free implementation of Ada... (Note that LLVM DragonEgg is still based on GPLv3'ed GCC, puke.)

The only thing to like about that language is its name!

--libman

When am I going to publish a commercial OS containing those desktop environments? Never. That's when.

That thought doesn't even cross my mind - if I publish anything it is always as open source and "public domain".

Seriously - when I publish open source software, I prefer to use BSD style licenses, but I don't shy away from GPL except when I might need to violate said GPL in order to get value from it. I just don't see that being an issue with desktop environments for Linux... at least not anymore.

It's good that you prefer "BSD-style" (copyFREE) licenses. We need to explain to more people the drawbacks and dangers of copyLEFT. Then, how far they would go in the name of software freedom, is obviously up to them.

Using restrictively-licensed software won't kill you, but it is a step in the wrong direction. It matters more than you'd think, because use of open source software is a relationship - the more familiar you are with a project, the more likely you are to contribute code someday, or to be helpful on its mailing list / bug-tracker / forum / IRC channel, or promote it to friends who see you use it, or leverage it in another (hopefully copyFREE) project, etc. The software you use today is the software you may contribute to years from now, even if you currently don't plan on contributing.

                Watch your thoughts; they become words.
                Watch your words; they become actions.
                Watch your actions; they become habit.
                Watch your habits; they become character.
                Watch your character; it becomes your destiny.
                                            -- Lao Tzu

Experience with freer software makes you more free.

--libman

E17 does not compete with KDE, GNOME, Xfce, LXDE, ROX, Razor-Qt, EDE, MATE, Cinnamon, etc. For people who care about software freedom, it leapfrogs them entirely, by the virtue of being the only copyfree alternative. All other full-scale desktop environments (DE's) are marred by GPL!

I for one was OK without a DE / widgets, using a light copyfree WM (ex wmii) + xterm + HTML5 (Opera, until the last remnants of gnushit are scraped off of WebKit). But for people who want both freedom and DE / widgets, E17 is now an option.

--libman

FreeBSD is "dying" in the sense that it is still growing and improving, but most idiots are running Ubuntu, which is growing faster. As stated in my comments to the previous story, what's really dying, slowly but surely, is GPL. Sooner or later serious permissively-licensed competitors to Linux will emerge - they probably won't be *BSD UNIX, but they may borrow significant parts of its code.

Slashdot is dying in the sense that socialist idiots have misused its stupid moderation features, creating one big homogeneous circle-jerk, while reasonable people like me get locked out (or resort to being AC's).

--libman

Alright, here's my shtick... It's a great race between two open source software ecosystems: copyLEFT and copyFREE.

The copyFREE side is a more amicable pacifist bunch, with more freedoms and more choices, and it has been gaining ground in the last decade in all software categories but one - the kernels. The copyLEFT side was founded by a bunch of militant hippies trying to destroy capitalism, and it had several years' head start, so its viral licenses were grandfathered into some of the most important pieces of open source software. The OS projects within each team like to share code, and the copyLEFT team can also mooch copyFREE code as well, but not the other way around...

This race is contested on many fronts, and one obscure comparison (that I just came up with) is: while running the race forward, to still maintain support for the 80386 platform. Only UNIX systems (sorry, sorry, sorry) that can run on a 80386 PC (sorry, sorry) with actively maintained current versions (sorry) are to be included. Let's see how the two teams compare:

THE COPYLEFT TEAM:

(1) Linux - now i486, as mentioned in this article.

THE COPYFREE TEAM:

(1) FreeBSD - i486 since 2005.

(2) OpenBSD - i486 since 2007.

(3) NetBSD - i486, "80386 support removed" in 2007.

(4) MINIX 3 - i586, 32mb RAM, 635mb HD.

So it looks like the copyLEFT camp had this little "current UNIX on 80386" advantage, and now lost it...

--libman

It's not a "failure" by any stretch of imagination. A lot of fundraising projects set an ambitious goal, and the year is far from over. The current tally is $304,844 - perfectly "on target"!

I think this story and some of its comments exhibit vindictive pro-copyLEFT bias that is prevalent among the GNU commies...

It should also be noted that the "FreeBSD Foundation Inc" is not FreeBSD - just one supporting pillar. FreeBSD is its code and developer / user community, with most contributors being unpaid volunteers. The ecosystem extends further, with code being shared with many other copyFREE projects in both directions, from other BSD OS'es to Haiku to Golang to Redis to Chromium. Centralization and bureaucracy are not necessary. Even if the Foundation suddenly disappeared tomorrow, the gradual advance of copyFREE software would continue unhindered!

--libman

I'm not going to contribute. Not because I don't like VLC, I do. But because I don't support windows 8.

I'm also not going to contribute. Not because I don't like VLC (though, in absence of HTML5 video, I tend to prefer ye olde mplayer). Not because I don't support Windows 8 (haven't tried it yet, but I'm sure some people like it, and for enough money I'd install it with bells on). Not because I'm broke (that's just a cover story for the IRS). But because I don't support GPL!

Now how about a copyfree-licensed platform-independent player (ideally an mplayer clone) that only includes genuinely free codecs like VP8, Theora, Opus, etc... (With features specific to a light-weight player rather than a Web browser, which still don't work very well for full-screen video on FreeBSD.)

The infected gaggle of non-copyfree codecs ought to be taken behind a barn and filleted with a dull axe!

--libman

With all due respect to your unixbeardedness, your statement has very little to do with the point I was making. We are comparing open source UNIX to open source UNIX, and what factors influenced the relative success of one OS over an other. The roots of the early success of Linux were the i386 "home users" with some blank floppies, who were far more numerous than people with access to corporate mainframes or university labs. I am explaining why those early adopters of Linux didn't go for BSD instead - BSD simply wasn't on their radar. Linux got there first, and when you've got one kernel you don't need another. (GNU's favoritism of Linux over BSD due to licensing bias is a separate issue.)

GNU was open-source (though restrictively-licensed) since its inception in 1983/4, and Linux from 1991. BSD was entangled in legal FUD until January 1994 , by which time we had not only Linux but also Slackware, Debian, etc. (To some people BSD's "obnoxious advertising clause" was even more of a turn-off than Linux's copyLEFT, and BSD didn't become fully compliant with copyFREE standards until 1999, but that's a side-issue.) So it was in January of 1994 when BSD became a contender, while Linux "went viral" among the home geek crowd in 1993.

Linus himself had said that if 386BSD had been available (i.e. free of AT&T legal uncertainty) at the time, he probably would not have created Linux. (And it didn't become fully free of legal FUD until a few months after that interview was published.) In that same interview, Linus also mentions other reasons that worked against BSD: higher hardware requirements, "lack of co-ordination", bad approach to release engineering, etc.

Switching kernels (which also meant switching file-systems, kernel-dependent system components, etc) has always been very difficult. Switching Web browsers is much easier, and its (mostly) BSD license didn't keep Chromium from leapfrogging over Firefox. Apache httpd wasn't the least bit handicapped by its non-copyLEFT (though not entirely copyFREE) license (in fact the "got there first" advantage of Apache has kept out decent GPL'ed Web servers like Cherokee), and it's now gradually yielding ground to the fully-copyFREE nginx. Among scripting languages, lisp (the most popular scripting language of the 80s, also Stallman's favorite) was overshadowed by weaker-copyLEFT perl, which in turn was leapfrogged by even-less-uncopyFREE python / php, and which are now being leapfrogged by fully-copyFREE node.js / ruby / etc. Apple's recent choices leave no doubt that GPL has handicapped the popularity of mysql and gcc.

Conclusion: The conjecture that FreeBSD was hurt by its license is baseless, buried under a mountain of more plausible handicaps in the history of FreeBSD's development, and is utterly contradicted in most other software categories!

--libman

With all due respect to your unixbeardedness, your statement has very little to do with the point I was making. We are comparing open source UNIX to open source UNIX, and what factors influenced the relative success of one OS over an other. The roots of the early success of Linux were the i386 "home users" with some blank floppies, who were far more numerous than people with access to corporate mainframes or university labs. I am explaining why those early adopters of Linux didn't go for BSD instead - BSD simply wasn't on their radar. Linux got there first, and when you've got one kernel you don't need another. (GNU's favoritism of Linux over BSD due to licensing bias is a separate issue.)

GNU was open-source (though restrictively-licensed) since its inception in 1983/4, and Linux from 1991. BSD was entangled in legal FUD until January 1994 , by which time we had not only Linux but also Slackware, Debian, etc. (To some people BSD's "obnoxious advertising clause" was even more of a turn-off than Linux's copyLEFT, and BSD didn't become fully compliant with copyFREE standards until 1999, but that's a side-issue.) So it was in January of 1994 when BSD became a contender, while Linux "went viral" among the home geek crowd in 1993.

Linus himself had said that if 386BSD had been available (i.e. free of AT&T legal uncertainty) at the time, he probably would not have created Linux. (And it didn't become fully free of legal FUD until a few months after that interview was published.) In that same interview, Linus also mentions other reasons that worked against BSD: higher hardware requirements, "lack of co-ordination", bad approach to release engineering, etc.

Switching kernels (which also meant switching file-systems, kernel-dependent system components, etc) has always been very difficult. Switching Web browsers is much easier, and its (mostly) BSD license didn't keep Chromium from leapfrogging over Firefox. Apache httpd wasn't the least bit handicapped by its non-copyLEFT (though not entirely copyFREE) license (in fact the "got there first" advantage of Apache has kept out decent GPL'ed Web servers like Cherokee), and it's now gradually yielding ground to the fully-copyFREE nginx. Among scripting languages, lisp (the most popular scripting language of the 80s, also Stallman's favorite) was overshadowed by weaker-copyLEFT perl, which in turn was leapfrogged by even-less-uncopyFREE python / php, and which are now being leapfrogged by fully-copyFREE node.js / ruby / etc. Apple's recent choices leave no doubt that GPL has handicapped the popularity of mysql and gcc.

Conclusion: The conjecture that FreeBSD was hurt by its license is baseless, buried under a mountain of more plausible handicaps in the history of FreeBSD's development, and is utterly contradicted in most other software categories!

--libman

Either it is Opposite Day in whatever land you come from, or you are a total idiot who doesn't know up from down.

The overwhelmingly obvious trend in the last 12 years has been the decline of restrictively licensed ("copyLEFT") projects in favor of genuinely free ("copyFREE") software. There's a sole noteworthy exception to this rule trend, which is the software component that produces the greatest lock-in: the Linux kernel. (I suggest you read that last linked thread in full - it has many links to details.)

GNU (1984) and Linux (1991) arrived many years before BSD became permissively licensed (1999). During that gap, Linux attracted a lot of attention, attained technological superiority, and, by the end of the century, it was considered the obvious choice in open source UNIX. Linux managed to capitalize on the collapse of proprietary UNIX and attract a lot of corporate support. It beats the BSD's on almost every performance benchmark. Kudos to Linus T - he got there first, made a thousand good decisions, and beat us fair and square!

But that doesn't mean Linux will remain the king of the mountain forever. Linux is being written by the very people who its license was designed to hurt! It is a loose alliance of corps mostly trying to undermine Microsoft, and this contradiction cannot last. Linus T made the right choice by not switching to the newer more-restrictive versions of GPL, which should buy it some more time. And its jack-of-all-trades approach, trying to be the ideal kernel for everything from nano to desktops to supercomputers, will catch up to it eventually.

See, sometime in the last few years, people actually started to pay attention to licensing, as the disadvantages of GPL started to become obvious. This resulted in a shift away from copyLEFT all across the board. Many projects switched licenses (ex. Ruby) and got a new lease on life, while in many software categories new copyFREE projects started to gradually suck away GPL's market share. At the turn of the millennium there were no decent copyFREE compilers, desktop environments, or Web browsers. Today we have Clang/LLVM, E17, and Chromium (well, almost - that's why I'd rather use Opera for now). In the most competitive categories, like scripting languages and Web servers, GPL is almost entirely dead. PostgreSQL, SQLite, Redis, etc are gradually squeezing MySQL. The HTML5 stack's gains are the loss of GTK/Qt/wx/etc, as well as of FFMPEG. FreeBSD is just about finished scraping off the last remnants of copyLEFT, which would have seemed unthinkable just a few years ago - now finally I can run a complete UNIX system without any GNU!

This trend is going to continue - gradually, patiently, at times with a few steps back and sideways, but moving forward in aggregate nonetheless. History takes time to play out. Maybe it will be Haiku on portable devices, and/or DragonFly BSD on large servers, and/or a completely new copyFREE OS that's yet to be initiated. Maybe the copyFREE champion Google will pull something out of its sleeve. But, sooner or later, the Penguin Empire will fall!

--libman

Google made a HUGE mistake by not basing Android on a stack of 100% copyFREE software, like a BSD kernel; avoiding Linux, the GNU toolchain, and Java.

The unfreeness of copyLEFT software will continue to sabotage the growth of genuinely free software, and cause many headaches for a long time to come...

--libman

niggers did it.

Naughty Ignorant Gnu/Gpl-Evangelist Retard Shitheads?

Nincompoops Inspired by Grotesque Grossness of Evil Richard Stallman?

Nefarious International Government Gatekeepers Eradicating Restrictionless Software?

Possibly...

--libman

Nothing could be further from the truth. I prefer copyfree software for philosophical reasons. Copyleft is not really free software - it is open source software with legal threats and anti-capitalist propaganda attached.

Notice how anyone critical of GPL gets "(Score: -1)", regardless of the substance of their arguments... This is making Slashdot look like a commie cult! Having a freer license is one of Haiku OS's greatest accomplishment, which needs to be recognized. They could have gone the easier route and borrowed code from Linux and other GPL projects, but they didn't.

So big kudos to the Haiku OS team for trying to create a Linux competitor in the market segment where the pure copyfree stack is rather weak: user-friendly desktop clients, netbooks, tablets, etc (although FreeBSD + E17 might be gaining ground as well).

--libman

First of all, the argument against GPL is primarily a moral argument. GPL is a product of socialist thinking that completely misunderstands how the FLOSS marketplace works, and tries to use "intellectual property" laws (thereby legitimizing them) to hurt "evil corporations". GPL is a gun, and one that is becoming more and more dangerous with every version. It is hypocrisy to call restrictively-licensed software "free".

Secondly, you are wrong on the pragmatic side as well.

Read a bit of UNIX history, will ya? BSD was entangled in legal FUD at just the very time when Linux was taking off (1991 to mid-1994). By the time BSD became BSD-licensed, Linux was the buzzword of the year. This avalanche of attention was great enough to allow it to overcome its licensing handicap.

If your premise was correct, then we'd be seeing a trend of other permissively licensed (copyfree) projects being leapfrogged by restrictively licensed (copyleft) ones, but in reality it's the other way around. The smartest new projects tend to use permissive licenses instead!

The Apache license hasn't stopped Apache httpd from dominating all potential GPLed alternatives over the years, and now it has been supplanted by the even more permissively-licensed Nginx. We've seen popular scripting languages go from copyleft (Lisp, Perl, SpiderMonkey) to almost-copyfree (PHP, Python) to fully-copyfree (V8 / Node.JS, relicensed Ruby, Lua, Go, alternative PHP and Python implementations, etc). Mozilla has been leapfrogged by Chrome. MySQL is slowly beginning to lose market share to PostgreSQL, SQLite, and the various copyfree NoSQL alternatives.

GPL still dominates only among the software projects that were "grandfathered in" in the 1990s, when most people uncritically accepted GPL as "THE open source license". This includes the Linux kernel, mplayer, the popular widget toolkits, and things based on top of them. (The BSD people were geekier than the Linux people, and thus didn't rush to create things like GTK+.) The popularization of HTML5 with copyfree media codecs (and eventually HTML6+, with NaCl, etc) will help the copyfree world leapfrog in the latter two categories.

--libman

[...] The BSDs long ago lost relevance. Pretty much there is not a thing that they do better than Linux and there is a lot that they do not do that Linux can do. [...]

Linux will always be shit because of the license.

FreeBSD is a dream UNIX system for anyone who doesn't drink the GPL kool-aid, especially with the transition from GCC to Clang. All the best server-side technologies (Node.js, Nginx, Redis, PostgreSQL, etc) are permissively licensed, and BSD constitutes the OS of that new stack. And, if you use (jailed) Opera (which doesn't require "half of gnome" in dependencies, the way Chromium does), you can have a fully functional HTML5 client system without a drop of GPL!

I also find FreeBSD to be a very stable system. Many times I've had a Linux system fail to start because I installed something bad in Synaptic (or for an undetermined cause), but the FreeBSD base system is bulletproof. It forces you to learn a few things in the beginning (as do the best Linux distros, like Gentoo and Arch), but after that it's very easy. Building from the FreeBSD ports tree always "just works", which isn't the case on Gentoo. Plus pretty much all Linux distros are bloated - for example, can you name one that doesn't absolutely mandate perl?

And, regarding the acknowledged Linux performance advantage (especially in fs) - DragonFly BSD is starting to catchup!

It is painfuil to install [...]

To each his own. I can get OpenBSD installed, pkg_add everything I need, untar everything I need to untar, etc - all in the time it takes a popular Linux distro installer just to load Gnome3 on its massively bloated LiveCD!

One major installation convenience weakness that BSD's still have is the difficulty of dealing with partitions. If you're switching between Windows and Linux, you can use something like gparted to shrink your old partition, create a new one, move files over, delete old partition, and then resize the new to fill the disk. If switching to/from or between BSDs (and not using multiple HAMMER volumes), then you're gonna have to back up to another drive... With cheap USB3 HDDs that's no longer as much of an issue though, and keeping such a drive for backup is a good idea in any case.

[...] and the hardware support is worse than Windows.

All UNIXen, including Linux, have inferior desktop hardware support to Windows. No wonder - desktop device manufacturers must place the needs of the >90% first!

BSD's (if not one then another) are pretty good at keeping up with Linux on server hardware that most people use. Sometimes Linux will include a proprietary BLOB to support a device, while the OpenBSD people will make the effort of writing a fully open source driver.

I cant see a a strength to it.

BSD is for people who care about freedom, first and foremost. It has some technical merits (which I hope will grow over time, as more and more people understand the downsides of GPL, switch to a BSD OS, and contribute), but that comes secondary.

--libman

This story summary uses the GNU logo as if it's synonymous with "software freedom". I hold a somewhat different definition of this concept, which I believe to be more rational than the guiding philosophy of GNU and the FSF. The main point of contention is the use of irrational anti-market restrictions in "copyleft" licenses like GPL.

My vision of "software freedom" recognizes the role that proprietary software has played (and continues to play) in the software sector of the economy. Since the early days of computing, it was proprietary software that was able to organize the best development efforts, and created the software that later movements like GNU attempted to imitate. While much imitative success has been reached, and even some innovation in certain specific fields has come from open source software, proprietary software continues to remain quite innovative and competitive, and economically empowers many individuals to later contribute to FLOSS projects as well.

Real "software freedom" is a marketplace, not an anti-capitalist theocracy that many GPL proponents (and especially Stallman) envision. Competitive market forces naturally create free software as price eventually falls down to the cost of distribution (which in the modern world is zero), and qualities like access to the source code become very important. Proprietary and FLOSS software evolve to exist in a symbiotic relationship, with innovating programmers being free to write proprietary components if they so choose, but which are quickly imitated and either an open source alternative emerges or they become open sourced themselves. For-profit companies like Google, Oracle, IBM, Apple, Adobe, and countless others (and now even Microsoft!) have contributed many great things to the FLOSS movement, which would have been impossible in Stallman's utopia where all proprietary efforts are outlawed. Without proprietary software to stimulate innovation and fuel programmer salaries, free software would have been a decade behind!

So please don't equate "software freedom" with copyleft restrictions, and give proprietary software the respect that it deserves. Please strongly consider switching your projects to a real free license, like BSD, MIT or CC0. Those licenses are ideal for the aforementioned symbiotic relationship, since anyone can copy this software for whatever purpose (without diminishing the original, and without depriving the original authors of the credit that they deserve). Free software came about not because of GPL, but in spite of it!

--libman

PS: This post was written on a "gnushit free" UNIX system: FreeBSD-current (everything compiled with Clang), running X, TTF fonts copied over from Windows, wmii, etc - and no copyleft software of any kind! I'm proudly using Opera (running in a jail), because it's a great light-weight browser that can run on pure X (w/o GTK or GNUpendancies of any kind).

Reminds me of that scene in Atlas Shrugged when James Taggart lays Lillian Rearden... ;)

Real free software does not use restrictive "copyleft" licenses. Real proprietary software relies on explicit contracts, not implicit intellectual monopolies backed by government force.

When compared to BtrFS, ZFS, etc - HAMMER is the first next-gen FS that is genuinely free software. It can therefore someday become the One Universal File System, fully supported on open source and proprietary systems alike.

BSD is genuine UNIX. Linux isn't.

BSD is genuinely free software. Linux isn't.

People who really care about freedom and know what they're doing run real UNIX operating systems and wouldn't touch Linux, Gnome, GTK, Qt, PulseAudio, Avahi, etc with a 10 foot pole. As for everyone else: 99% of them run Windows or Mac.

(Signed: Alex Libman's sockpuppet.)

My fellow supporters of market-friendly free software licenses (as opposed to the commie GNU crap) will be happy to hear that BitcoinJ has an Apache license, and hopefully it will be able to run on the Apache Harmony JVM in addition to the restrictive GPL one from Oracle.

The original Bitcoin client also has a Copyfree license, but it has some restrictive dependencies (ex. wx) and it's a pain to install on *BSD.

About that empty link in the last sentence of the summary - did the author intend to link to a story about commie thuggery against the Liberty Dollar?

I'm a diehard OpenBSD user. It is the only operating system that deserves to be called free.

(Mandatory link.)

The one positive thing about Qt is that there's at least a remote chance of it becoming genuinely free software... someday... If this merger means more code falling under this condition - good.

It's licensed under a copyLEFT, restrictive software license that places many limits on who can use it, where, and how. Only copy FREE and "public domain" software can logically be considered "free as in freedom"!

Did I ever say that? Nope.

I said I want the choice on whether or not I want to reciprocate. Maybe that's the same to you as saying "I don't want to reciprocate, ever." It's not to me. In one instance I'm saying I just want an option, in the other instance you are saying I shouldn't have that option.

Also, if I didn't want people to use my stuff, why would I bother advocating CopyFree policies?

It isn't good for freedom because it involves copyleft. It does nothing to keep anyone free. It's just another sort of shackle. Throw off the shackles!

You're right, I don't know, but they will become irrelevant despite all of that.

I know that ASCAP is supposed to facilitate those things, but what they are doing right now doesn't make any sense.

Open Source doesn't take money away from anyone. It never has and never will. People who participate any sort of copyleft (or even copyfree) licensing do so WILLINGLY. By equating the EFF and others like them with copyright infringers using bittorrent to illegally trade in the work will backfire on them and cause them to become irrelevant. If they want to win some real points, especially amongst the intelligencia, their arguments need to be based in reality. Ad hominem and other such logical fallacies used to attack them WILL eventually backfire. They will marginalize themselves because no one will become/remain a member just due to the bad press.

I CopyFree license all my work using the OWL just because I think it's DUMB to restrict my work. If I can make money off of it, fine. Otherwise, it probably stunk in the first place and I need to move on to the next project.

How do I make a living? With a little work and ingenuity.

...is why I don't do any work creating anything for WordPress. CopyFree is the way to go.