RE: LINUX is the "one" ? .... Comments???

On Thursday 03 April 2003 10:31 pm, jt wrote:
> <poking head in here fer a sec, and still haven't caught up on entire
> thread...>  No, Scott.  The GPL is there to establish a monopoly so
> that ALL GPL'd software is free.  See the Free Software Foundation and
> GNU principles.  Sure, there's LGPL and many other licenses that are
> better.

Free yes, but the essential thing is 'free as in speech', *not* 
necessarily 'free as in beer'.

> But the purpose of the GPL is to set up a framework where ALL software
> (and, eventually, EVERYTHING that can be stored on a hard drive) CAN
> NOT be SOLD. This is the stated goals of RMS (Richard M. Stallman) and
> FSF.

This just *isn't* true. Stallman himself used to sell his Emacs editor on 
tape, and charged a fair bit more than media costs in the process. The 
GPL does *not* say you can't sell GPL software. 
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html It's true that the freedoms 
granted by the GPL mean that you can't prevent someone else from giving 
away what you have bought, thus making it less likely you'll make a 
killing from it, but it doesn't stop you from selling it in the first 
place. The FSF would ideally like to replace all proprietary software 
with free software (which realistically is unlikely to ever happen), but 
that doesn't equate to saying free software cannot be sold.  

>   This doesn't even work well in the Academic Community which He
> works in.  (He SURE ain't a software developer, in any sense the term
> as I know it.)  But somehow this communist approach to software
> development has been sold to the business community, in spite of that.

He might not be as involved in development now, but he's churned out a 
fair amount of software. Emacs isn't exactly a small project, and neither 
is gcc, originally the GNU C Compiler. 

As far as the approach (which I don't equate with communism) being sold to 
the business community is concerned, what's the problem. Companies either 
do it because it saves/makes them more money, or because they're gullible 
enough to buy into the current fads. In that proprietary software is no 
different. In fact with more advertising dollars to spend, I think the 
latter is more likely. Paying little or nothing for software doesn't 
automatically make it bad, any more that paying an arm and a leg for it 
makes it good.

> Not saying the GPL has single-handedly KILLED the market for TRUE
> INNOVATION in software, the past decade...  There were other factors,
> too.

Just what do *you* define as true innovation? What products are really 
innovative, and not just a tweak or re-implementation of someone elses 
project? The early GNU project wasn't trying to innovate as such - it was 
trying to provide a free version of UNIX, so obviously had standards & 
functions to design to. There's been quite a bit of discussion on Eclipse 
here, which is, at heart, an extensible editor & development environment. 
Emacs was already that a long time ago which is why it's still popular 
over two decades later.  

Regards, Martin
-- 
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