Date: Sat, 13 Feb 1999 15:49:36 -0700 From: Brett Glass <brett@lariat.org> To: dyson@iquest.net, naddy@mips.rhein-neckar.de (Christian Weisgerber) Cc: freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Linus on IRC Message-ID: <4.1.19990213154251.03fa0e30@mail.lariat.org> In-Reply-To: <199902131913.OAA05365@y.dyson.net> References: <7a2k5g$mgp$1@mips.rhein-neckar.de>
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At 02:13 PM 2/13/99 -0500, John S. Dyson wrote: >Your statement might be true (that you don't see that it is and has happened), >but it is indeed also true that there is and has been significant advocacy >in the >Linux camp against *BSD and the BSD license. There is indeed. The strongest voice in this camp is, not surprisingly, Richard Stallman -- who has a proprietary interest in seeing the FSF grow as powerful as possible. >I respect, but am not strongly influenced by other peoples political or >economic >agenda associated with hatred of companies or certain industry. My interest is >that free work that I do be free, and not be encumbered with silly hoops for >users >of my work to jump through. The "manifesto" seems to be born out of hatred >and/or >frustration, and maybe it is simply from day one orthogonal to my interests. It was. John, do you know the full story of the GPL? It was born, or so I'm told, out of Stallman's resentment of commercial spinoffs of academic research. >I kind of like the sort of license that says: use my code, but don't steal >credit >from me. You don't even have recode my work to get credit or freer use, and >so in >order to avoid that, I already give you very free use. I also don't take away >your right to spend hours, days or months to enhance the work that I did, and >profit by selling the derived works -- I support your freedom to do with your >own source code as you see fit, including freely redistributing it, without >my own excessive control over you. I am not crazy enough to believe that your >selling the derived works makes my original code unavailable, because it is >my intent and desire to help others with my labor -- but not overly influence >(force or trick) you to give your time away. Hear, hear! >Licenses that force cloaking development >costs as support costs don't provide for the open and honest communication >between supplier and customer as to the real support cost overhead needed to >fulfill >the support contract. True. Of course, cloaking of payments is all the rage nowadays. Asking for direct payments is a huge turnoff; that's why Slate couldn't make it as a paid subscription site but COULD make it when supported by advertisers. The readers are still paying; they can just delude themselves into believing they're not. They may in fact pay a smidgen less because the cost is spread to other consumers who don't benefit, but this actually is unfair. --Brett Glass To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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