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

Here's why I love it:

[Sheetrock]

Literally hundreds or thousands of programmers that used to charge for their services now work for free.

Definitely an improvement over the old days where you had to buy every little utility.

Re:Here's why I love it:

[rongten]

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.

GPL

[northcat]

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

Big on you.

[Anonymous Coward]

"Thanks for reminding us, Joe. (NewsForge and Slashdot are both owned by OSTG.)""

Nope. No corporate behemoths here.

from the when-you-blah-blah-blah?

[drinkypoo]

from the when-you-have-nothing-new-to-say-but-like-to-hear- yourself-talk-anyway dept.

My passion for the GPL

[Anonymous Coward]

I like it because when Bruce Perens created the GPL back in the late 70s for Sun, he was considering the average home user who may have needed to compile his latest application.

Back then applications were published in computer magazines such as Omni, Compute and of course Scientic American. These were usually in hundreds lines of code in length and principally written in Assembler.

There's not a week that goes by when I think of Mr Perens and his contributions with the GPL and the neural networks which lead to the discovery of the Internet.

Which is nice.

even I can help

[meza]

I have never programmed professionally. I've been playing around with c and some other languages for some years though. And I have been using gnu software for about as long. But it wasn't until this christmas that I really realized it's power. I've always been thinking that "sure, open source is a good thing, because then the others who know things can make changes".

But just before christmas I was playing a bit with the new transparency that xorg har brought us, and I was annoyed about the lack of functions in "transset". So I decided to take a look at its code. It turned out the program was very simple and within some hours, without any previous knowladge of Xlib and X-programming, I managed to change its behavoiur the way I wanted. (http://forchheimer.se/transset-df/)

Then I suddenly understood that you don't have to be a super guru who understands all the systems sourcecode to gain from open source. One day there will be some little thing that is bothering you that you actually CAN do something about.