Why I Love The GPL

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.)"

Comments

Re:hey michael who gives a flyin shit?!

[j3richo]

truth

Why the BSDL represents the anarchy to come

[delirium of disorder]

[I am re-posting this] Even putting your work in the public domain puts it within the legal but immoral intellectual property system. However, the BSDL grants the rights I wish people could automatically have. The GPL places unnecessaries and restrictions on users/programmers and perpetuates the intellectual property system. I personally don't think the law should have any say in IP, but if I must license my code, I want to point out what rights I wish people had. I personally think business should be allowed to use whatever license they want...they can even use some of my code in their proprietary licensed product. If the license is too restrictive, people should be smart enough not to buy that product or to just break the terms of the EULA...but it should be up to the consumer. The only thing anyone should not be allowed* to do, is cause real harm**. People can express anything they want, even if their expression entails reiterating an idea, c function, poem, etc that they did not author. Copyright, patents, and licenses are all restrictions on free speech. People also have the right to do whatever they want to their own property or body or the property or body of someone else with consent. Ideas, code, etc, are not property because they can be copied infinitely at no cost. When you "steal" a song from the RIAA, the RIAA still has the original! Free market economics (and even most command econ) is based on the idea that there are unlimited demands and wants, but only a finite supply of products. This is only true in an IP economy in that there's an insatiable demand for NEW ideas; the old ones can be copied until everyone has as many as they want. The profit motive that drives the demanded innovation is also totally scewed because people are simply more creative if they aren't directed by a private tyranny (corporation). Good art does not come from a marketing department, a better source might be an eccentric who produces what they find beautiful, not what sells. Good music doesn't come from the RIAA, it comes from some innovator on an indy label who is willing to risk not sounding exactly like every top 40 hit. All intellectual innovation is plagerism and "theft" because there is nothing new in the world. Everyone learns from those around them and imporves or expands on older concepts. Although many exellent programmers (OSS and proprietary) are now well paid by big business, what most /.ers don't realize is that OSS has already won out in terms of influence! You don't have to look at Linux to see the results free software. The internet and TCP/IP is a free open standard implemented by a combination of capitalism (western ISPS, hardware/software developers), socialism (the university system, libraries, other public access, public funded R&D, much of it from the DoD), and anarchy (the actual content on the net itself). MS windows has BSD code in it. Apple's Darwin IS BSD. SUN/Solaris will soon be opening its code (its been illegally available for a while now). There are easily accessible underground source distributions of Cisco IOS too. Moreover, the programmers at places like Microsoft are standing on the shoulders of giants. Even if they weren't able to directly access old code bases, their conceptual training in computer science and software engineering came from a university system where the free exchange of ideas is quite highly valued. People no longer respect IP law. Downloading/Uploading an MP3 that someone else copyrighted may be illegal, but we all do it. Soon IP law will be a unenforceable anachronism. Its a stupid conservative restriction on civil liberates like the old sodomy laws that were struck down by the USA court system just recently. Hopefully drug laws will go the same way, then laws requiring taxes (when most of that money goes to killing people). The ultimate libertarian dream would be people slowly realizing that government only has power in their minds. Trying to reform IP law with Creative Commons to replace copyright, free access to patents to replace trade secr

Stalinism != communism

[Stephen Samuel]

My point is that you're talking about stalinism, not communism.

Under stalinism what the workers saw is that they worked their asses off, and the party bigwigs lived on the high hog of the the workers' efforts -- Not much different than some 'capitalistic' corporations.

Communism is 'give according to capability, take according to need'. Stalinism is 'Give according to the party plan, take according to rank in the party.'

Since rank in the party mattered far more than what one contributed to the commons workers had no real incentive to work hard.

Communism is also supposed to be controled by the workers -- a democracy by another name. Stalinism would have none of that. -- thus the workers were working on the plans of distant bigwigs, with no input to the plan, and no real profit for their work (it all went to the same bigwigs). That pretty much sucks.

This is part of the reason why sweat shops work so well in impoverished 3rd and 4th world countries -- It's pretty much the same situation as stalinist russia, except for the fact that the workers are literally discardable. If the worker doesn't do exactly what you tell them to when you tell them to and how you tell them to, you can simply toss them out like a rag, and find somebody even more desperate than them to work under slave-like conditions. If they hold a strike, you can just call in the police (or a private security force) to shoot them.
Pretty much the same as the worst of the stalinist era -- or the US Circa the 1930s.

Sweden is an example of a socialist state -- with democracy, socialized health care and pretty much cradle-to-grave support from the government. The standard of living and productivity are both relatively high.

Mexico is another example of the extremes of capitalism. -- A very steep pyramid, with a few extremely rich and lots of extremely poor. There are few social services, lots of very desparate people and some really nasty problems with things like pollution from companies with very little public oversight.