GPL 3 As Bonfire of the Vanities

morganew writes "Jonathan Zuck has written a CNET Op-ed stating that the GPL 3 is about returning the flock to the faith, and is reminiscent of Savonarola's 'Bonfire of the Vanities', urging true believers to burn things that took their eyes off God. From Article: 'The commercial humanists such as Lawrence Lessig with his Creative Commons initiative have turned away from the Old Testament, and the GPL 3.0 license is a call to the faithful to reject these vanities'. Given the reaction by Linus Torvalds and nearly all the OSS business community to the GPL 3, are we going to see a break in the church?"

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Freedom to Create Free Software is Good

[digitaldc]

Enter Girolamo Savonarola, a Dominican priest, who came to power in Florence in 1494. He viewed all of this "humanism" as vanity, turning people's heads away from the word of God and true religion. He took a very severe stand against the new scholarship, culminating in a series of bonfires in the town square, where many great works of art and science were lost. These fires have come to be known as the "Bonfire of the Vanities."
Like Savonarola, Richard Stallman takes a similarly religious stance on software development, rather than a practical one. For Stallman, the concept that software be "free, as in freedom" is the only concern in the creation of software.

At first, I was thinking that Stallman, was the opposite of someone like Savonarola, since he encourages 'freedom' in software creation and not adhering to strict rules or religion. And freedom should include the freedom to create any software you like, totally free or hybrid - though this is not exactly what Stallman envisioned. But of course, all this 'freedom' could lead to something altogether different - 'not free' code and this could not be named 'public.'

I do not see the point of this person's article, except to stir up bad feelings against Stallman. Maybe since the guy works for the Association for Competitive Technology (ACT), he has an agenda to push - creating disdain for the concept of free software? ACT doesn't like OpenOffice, so they probably do not like Stallman either.