Slashdot Mirror
GPL Lawsuit May Not Settle
A number of readers wrote in to inform us that contrary to earlier indications, it's no sure thing that the lawsuit alleging GPL violation by Monsoon Multimedia will get settled out of court. Linux.com now reports that the SFLC's legal director Daniel Ravicher has stressed that no agreement has been reached: "Simply coming into compliance now is not sufficient to settle the matter, because that would mean anyone can violate the license until caught, because the only punishment would be to come into compliance." (Linux.com and Slashdot are both part of Sourceforge, Inc.)
You say "Does an admittedly left leaning GPL..." I want to know who "admit[ted]" that the GPL is "left leaning," and when. Don't cite me RMS's opinions on other matters, or the lifestyle of FLOSS users, or any other ad hominem red herrings. Tell me, specifically, whose admission you are referring to.
You know, that is some heap of non-logic you are throwing out there buddy. You would seriously believe that a person's body of thought is somehow isolated from a major portion of his work. That's absurd.
RMS's political philosophy is socialist, in that, he argues that the needs of the consumers so completely outweigh the rights of the producers that the producers of goods have no rights at all. The central thrust of his philosophy is that ownership is bad. That's socialism, and that, by definition, is leftist.
Being a software man, and, by all accounts, a rather intelligent and well thought one, he seeks to stamp his political philosophy into the technology world, before it is too late. To that end, RMS invents the GPL. The GPL is a license based on copyright. But note that he does not believe, per se, in copyright law. He argues, ultimtely, that http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/, that, software should not be "owned" at all, but recognizes that under most western law, that copyright is the means with which to best achieve his end, effectively.
Stallman notes the stock socialist criticism of the soviet union - the communists were bad, and they just wanted it all for themselves. The thing is, a more detailed look at the history of soviet communism would show that many of the communist leaders were really actually rather smart, and genuinely tried to do the right thing, but power corrupts, over time. To some degree, stalin's paranoid period aside, many of the communist constraints on freedom were really, like the GPL gone mad - to protect the workers, we have to have rule, after rule, after rule, to keep it just so. It just doesn't work, and a worse tyranny results. The downfall of any socialist system is that to get the social arrangement you want in even one aspect of it, sooner or later, you have to try to control all of it. It's just the nature of things.
Otherwise, I will file you (and any further arguments you may wish to make) next to people who misuse the word "literally," cannot distinguish between "to" and "too," and believe that quotation marks are used to add emphasis.
Your threat is silly. It's silly that you are offended that I've called the GPL for what it is, an attempt to put a socialist system into software. Note that, I didn't make any moral judgements about it. In all other fields, the "real fields", I think socialism is evil, not because the idea is bad, because, on paper, if it could work, it would have been alright. It's just, its failed everywhere it has been applied. But in software, who knows, maybe it might work. That software can be copied without cost changes things, and its worth it to let things play out, as the experiment of GPL, and following its consequences with non-free software, is really the social experiment of our time, and it should be viewed as a non-catastrophic and above all, peaceful way to study the interactions of radically different ideologies as they compete and coexist. Who knows, maybe from all of this, some new thoughts about a radically new economic system might arise from this interaction, that gives us the benefits of capitalism but that addresses the social concerns that socialism wants to, but can't.
If you claim to have an open mind, the first thing to do is call things what they are, not call them what you want people to believe them to be.
This is my sig.