Date: 27 Jun 2003 10:24:37 -0700 From: swear@attbi.com (Gary W. Swearingen) To: FreeBSD Chat <freebsd-chat@freebsd.org> Subject: Re: RMS says: "Use BSD, for goodness sake!" Message-ID: <qrisqrzb56.sqr@localhost.localdomain> In-Reply-To: <3EFBFEBD.B8772772@mindspring.com> References: <4.3.2.7.2.20030625214311.00e5e240@localhost> <20030626110336.GW34365@iconoplex.co.uk> <20030626113553.GA53078@packet.org.uk> <20030626122023.GB763@nitro.dk> <20030626124601.GB57378@iconoplex.co.uk> <3EFBFEBD.B8772772@mindspring.com>
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Paul Robinson <paul@iconoplex.co.uk> writes: > [snip] if the goal of moving to a non-GPL environment was going to be > met. [snip] Thank you for using "if". As much as I dislike copyleft, it's clear (from this thread alone) that moving to a no-copyleft FreeBSD should not be a goal. Developing as much good non-GPL software as possible is a better goal, regardless whether some GPL software is being used. Using some GPL software helps with that goal more than replacing it would, given the number of FreeBSD developers (and level of *BSD cooperation). The reason for removing copyleft software should not be to fend off lies like "FreeBSD is a GNU system". The reason should be to give people the ability to modify the OS's software without having to participate in the development of copyleft software. But the value of that ability (to modify under a good license), or the value of candidate modifications, is sometimes not worth the costs of re-developing the software and/or keeping it in sync with the often-de-facto-standard copyleft version and otherwise maintaining it, especially when that cost is measured in terms of equivalent efforts which could have been used for developing other FreeBSD software. And sometimes the modifications are small enough to be done under copyleft with a tolerable level of shame. :) But after someone has scratched their "itch", I suppose it's hard to not accept the results into the OS and to complain that the efforts should have been used elsewhere or that it is unworthy of the maintenance burden it will place on FreeBSD. But I think it should be resisted in some cases. For example, I can't imagine it makes sense to shoulder the burden of maintaining a competitor to "gawk"; I'm thinking that the value of any modifications to this de-facto standard setter, is less than zero, so that there's no good reason to maintain a competitor that can be modified under a good license. (I guess it could be justified for performance improvements, but I doubt that performance is an issue.)
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