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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."
For those who actually want to know, its name came from 1984 and Big Brother. It serves as a reminder that with great power comes great responsibility. 20 years ago when created, Vern Paxson was not thinking about or anticipating fraternity culture connotations.
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.
Your saying your not free unless you have the right to deprive others of freedom...
The same arguments where used to justify slavery.
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.
Wrong, the GPL only refers to the distribution of the software, and here the only requirement is that you pass on all the freedoms that were given to you when you received the software. For what you actually use the software this is completely up to you, in fact restricting the use of the software (e.g. "non-commercial only" or "no military use") is incompatible with the GPL.
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.
Here you contradict yourself, because by distributing a closed-source derivative of some free software is taking away the freedom to create a derivative from your modified version.