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Software Freedom Conservancy Asks For Supporters
paroneayea writes: Software Freedom Conservancy is asking people to join as supporters to save both their basic work and GPL enforcement. Conservancy is the steward of projects like Samba, Wine, BusyBox, QEMU, Inkscape, Selenium, and many more. Conservancy also does much work around GPL enforcement and needs 2,500 members to join in order to save copyleft compliance work. They list some of the past year's successes, too, including fighting for and successfully earning "an exemption from the Library of Congress in the DMCA review process to legally permit circumvention of encryption on Smart TVs, ensuring that you are free to hack on the devices that you legally own."
I don't want to support, or otherwise be involved with, GPL enforcement. It sounds to me like it's the creator of a piece of software dictating exactly what I can and can't do with it. I don't think that's freedom. I think that's a form of tyranny, and I want no part of it. I use software released under truly free licenses like the BSD license and the MIT license precisely because those licenses are all about me being able to use the software pretty much however I damn well want. I avoid GPL'ed software because it's all about me being told what I can and can't do with it, and I don't like that. The right for somebody to create closed-source derivatives is something that should be protected. Not protecting it is merely the act of taking away freedom.