Thu, 09 Mar 2006

GPL 3.0: A bonfire of the vanities?

I'm going to leave the discussion of whether or not the GPL (3 or any version) is a Good Thing for another day, because I think Mr. Zuck is missing the point here entirely. Of course RMS has a "religious stance" on software. In fact, that's the whole raison d'être for the Free Software Foundation and the GPL! Without this extreme posture, you have any number of other Open Source licenses - the GPL is designed this way, and quite purposefully. "Free as in Freedom" is what FSF and GPL are all about.

Secondly, I'd be willing to bet that Mr. Zuck has a "religious stance" on "intellectual property" issues of his very own, seeing as how he's the President of the Association for Competitive Technology. And I'll further wager that it's diametrically opposed to Stallman's. His group was founded in 1998 as a "grassroots" group to fight the Microsoft antitrust action (while being funded from Redmond), and widely acknowledged to be a Microsoft front organization. To extend the Renaissance analogies used in the article, this is like the Pope criticizing Dr. Luther for being too religious and impractical!

Jonathan Zuck says GPL advocates are adopting a religious stance on software development, rather than a practical one.

(link) [CNET News.com]

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