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Why I Love The GPL

Posted by michael on from the when-you-care-enough-to-send-the-very-best dept.

Roblimo writes "'There are a lot of good reasons to like the GPL: the GNU Public License. For one thing, it's a David and Goliath kind of thing. It's the little guy standing up to the corporate behemoths that run rough-shod over our daily lives by virtue of their influence, legal and otherwise, on government. For another, it's virtuous.' These are the opening words to a NewsForge article praising the GPL by Joe Barr. Now and then we forget how much of the software we use and love is made possible by the General Public License. Thanks for reminding us, Joe. (NewsForge and Slashdot are both owned by OSTG.)"

8 of 488 comments (clear)

  1. GPL by northcat · · Score: 5, Informative

    It's the GNU General Public License, not GNU Public License.

    1. Re:GPL by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

      Yep! Well, Joe Barr is known to be a little dodgy, and if he doesn't even know the full name of the subject he is talking about, i can't respect his article.

    2. Re:GPL by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

      Except that the culture also builds software that is a pain in the ass to modify. Example: GCC. Several people have wanted to modularize gcc to make it easier for compiler researchers to add their special sauce. Particularly, there have been arguments to produce a standard output for the intermediate representations at various stages. The gcc team fights against this because taking the output from gcc and redirecting to another application would enable the other application to be proprietary. As a consequence, gcc is built in such a way that it is *VERY* difficult to build add-ons for. This philosophy has benefitted gcc in some ways: The objective-C front end would probably not have been released GPL if apple could have somehow "fed" gcc the parsed output without linking directly into gcc. However, it has also hurt gcc: optimization experts who understand graph theory very well but can't understand gcc code very well end up moving on to a different product.

  2. Re:Why i love his anti-MS rhetorics by utahjazz · · Score: 1, Informative

    He isn't accusing MS of stealing the TCP/IP protocol, he's accusing them of stealing the acutal BSD TCP/IP stack code.

  3. Re:My contrarian view of the GPL license by Tatarize · · Score: 2, Informative

    Yeah, I once looked at a Linix CD and was forced to give away my first born.

    --

    It is no longer uncommon to be uncommon.
  4. Re:Here's why I love it: by rongten · · Score: 5, Informative

    I seem to recall that the FSF did quite a
    lot of actions against some companies,
    like one that was producing routers in
    violation of the GPL.

    And each time stupid people were crying out loud that the FSF was "enforcing" the GPL and that
    they were communist, viral GPL, blah, blah, but that is beside the point.

    So, yes, you can force people and companies
    to abide to GPL, but not by yourself.

    That's why if you are concerned about
    company stealing the work of who
    benefit as all, there is an easy way to
    help :http://member.fsf.org/join.

    Time to actually do something about this,
    ladies and gentlemen.

    --
    Zed: Nothing is ever easy
  5. Re:Simple-The Gold Standard. by Waffle+Iron · · Score: 2, Informative
    Would anyone care to explain this apparent conflict?

    It's because the GPL uses IP in an attempt to simulate a world without IP. In order to effectively create this simulation in the real world, they have to enforce the IP mechanisms that they use for that purpose. It's an ironic situation, but it's not really a genuine contradiction. It's the closest mapping of their goals onto the current reality.

  6. Pure ignorance - please read the BSD license. by ulib · · Score: 2, Informative

    It's quite possible that Microsoft is still using the exact same code, but simply removed all the copyright notices as allowed by the amended BSD licence.

    What kind of bullshit is this?
    You CAN'T remove the copyright notices by the code that is under a BSD license.
    This has nothing to do with the removal of the "advertising clause".

    You CAN'T relicense any code that isn't either written by you or put in the public domain.
    If you use any BSD code in your software, you MUST give credit to the author by distributing the BSD license along with your software, because that license is *still* covering the code you imported.

    Sorry if I used bold but this misunderstanding is quite widespread, and it's just fostered by the stupidity of those claiming, or implying, that BSD code can be "stolen".

    Would you mind learning to promote your favourite license (in this case, GPL) without spreading FUD over other licenses like MIT or BSD?
    You know, nobody is forcing people to post comments when they don't know a goddamn thing of what they're talking about.

    --
    Being able to read *other people's* source code is a nice thing, not a 'fundamental freedom'.