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

On Thu, Apr 03, 2003 at 10:32:51PM +0000, Martin Rowe wrote:
> 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.  

RMS's goal is nothing less than the destruction of the software industry as
we now know it. While it is true that you can sell GPLed software, the
practical effect is that you won't make any sort of a living off of it.

That said, this is a religious issue, best discussed on a nontechnical list.
(I should know. I've been participating in these discussions for well over a
decade now; I invented the term "General Public Virus" in 1989 in one such
discussion.)