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The Free Software Foundation's Statement On Canonical's Updated Licensing Terms
New submitter donaldrobertson writes: After two years of negotiations, Canonical has updated the intellectual property rights policy for Ubuntu Linux to address a disagreement over how the software is licensed. The FSF announcement reads in part: "In July 2013, the FSF, after receiving numerous complaints from the free software community, brought serious problems with the policy to Canonical's attention. Since then, on behalf of the FSF, the GNU Project, and a coalition of other concerned free software activists, we have engaged in many conversations with Canonical's management and legal team proposing and analyzing significant revisions of the overall text. We have worked closely throughout this process with the Software Freedom Conservancy, who provides their expert analysis in a statement published today." Richard Stallman thinks there are still other issues to address saying: "While the FSF acknowledges that the first update emerging from that process solves the most pressing issue with the policy ... the policy remains problematic in ways that prevent us from endorsing it as a model for others."
While I am not 100% in agreement with Stallman all the time (EG I am vehemently against toe cheese), where the hell did the quote from him in the TFS originate? It is not in TFA.
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
Stallman is an extremist... There was never any possibility of satisfying him, it's not worth the effort to even try. He's kind of a free software terrorist if you think about it because if you don't do it his way he makes it his personal agenda to hurt your product.
He's also a massive hypocrite who says "it's fine to make money from free software" and then proceeds to bitch and moan about anyone who does other than himself because apparently the only legitimate way to make money in his mind is by eating toenails and being a leech on society.
So ... Who gives a shit if Stallman approved, no one that actually matters.
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Due to the stupid decisions of Canonical, we have decided to migrate our 3095 Ubuntu boxes to Debian. The future of Ubuntu looks unclear with the clusterfuck that is going on with both the corporation and its community.
Your quite ridiculous personal attack on Stallman suggests that you are mentally and socially challenged, with no developed sense of propriety nor common decency, and certainly no ability with logic.
You probably thought that your crass invective constituted reasoning. Alas it didn't, but merely highlighted your intellectual shortcomings.
The following will probably be far beyond your capability, but I suggest that you spend a few years trying to understand the concept of Logical Fallacy before posting again on this subject or on any other.
I'm still trying to figure out why Stallman can't be mentioned without a dozen users spewing the same cliched tirades, against a person who... has done what, exactly? Advocates a distro (gnewsense) that virtually nobody uses because it unnecessarily removes free software? Yeah, God damn him. He's ruining everything. Well, except for giving us the license that led to Android being an open source project, instead of being another locked down iOS-ish experience. And for giving us the license that's given desktop and server Linux users to millions upon millions of dollars of corporate-sponsored contributions that would have otherwise been locked down and lost in obscurity (also, absolutely destroying what very well might have been a Microsoft monopoly in the x86 server market before it had a chance to take off) whilst the BSD-based OSX remains locked down and illegal to use if you don't buy overpriced Apple hardware.
But no, the man has some 'extreme' personal views, which he does not try to involuntarily foist on any users anywhere and he occasionally tries to convince companies to voluntarily behave in ways that are healthier for the free software ecosystem, so therefore he must be bashed every time his name is mentioned. Oh, and he expects that people who voluntarily agree to the GPL to abide by its terms.
Goddamn terrorist.
* unnecessarily removes unfree software
Can anybody provide a link (or actual text) to Canonical's Contributor License Agreement? I googled and all I could find was this page which seems to be asking people to sign something they haven't even read.
No any software with licensing that he disagrees with.
Too much truth written here. Too much for the mods to handle.
I'm not sure what you expect to prove by listing a bunch of non-sequitur aphorisms. We have the facts in front of us, and it is very easy to imagine how the alternate universe would work by substituting "BSD" in place of "Linux". Does "Red Hat BSD" give away virtually their entire operating system for free, including modification and rebranding? No. No they fucking do not, and you cannot be taken seriously if you try to claim otherwise. I'm not talking about a minor permissive-licensed project (such as the kind that Apple or Google have been known to support) that doesn't affect the bottom line; we are talking about a software company open sourcing the lion's share of the code they write for their main/only product. There isn't a large, for-profit corporation in the world that does that kind of thing without some kind of legal compulsion. (Or perhaps you'd like to point out a sizable BSD-based for-profit distro that doesn't try to close source? They've had decades to come out with one.) So, admitting the absurdity of "Red Hat BSD" is step one.
Step two is admitting that while there are a number of decent home-grown options today, corporate-originated apps and sometimes core components are still very commonplace in your average distro and 10+ years ago they were even more prominent and important, particularly for business and other semi-technical users. Without corporate contributions, particularly from Linux-centric businesses like RHAT, Linux would be a pale shadow of what it is today, not just because it's hard to find full time volunteers but also because the whole thing needed a sustained kickstart before it reached a level where it was useful and appealing to people who weren't already hardcore Unix enthusiasts.
And... that's it. Admit those two things, and it's self-evidently true that the GPL was and is critical to Linux's success. This isn't philosophy any more; this is proven history. BSD gave us Apple's unholy reincarnation. GPL gave us Red Hat, Canonical, Novell, IBM, and dozens of other companies paying hundreds of developers to work on Linux full time, and every step along the way made perfect logical sense. There is no mystery as to why it happened this way.
If you want to argue otherwise, you're going to have to do a lot better than what you wrote there. For starters, you could try referring to reality once in a while.
I like to think Richard Stallman is that guy. We all know one. Has to correct you. You can't just say Linux you have to say GNU/Linux. Which is cumbersome as hell. Beyond the GPL he hasn't contributed much. He just became more of a pompous talking head then anything else. I personally just don't like the guy cause of those reasons alone.
it is very easy to imagine how the alternate universe would work by substituting "BSD" in place of "Linux". Does "Red Hat BSD" give away virtually their entire operating system for free, including modification and rebranding?
The great thing is we don't have to imagine; the history of BSD is clear; first BSD/386 took a bunch of potential developers and users and then failed. Then there were a bunch of other failures. Then Apple took it all completely proprietary.