ThePanda

This is my little rant about licensing, it is somewhat work related, but as before I am not breaking any rules here.

People of this world love GPL, much like the people of this world like RMS. GPL is good for somethings, there was a time when I actually used to put GPL notices on top of some of the code I wrote, however GPL also makes software hard to use in certain circumstances, and that sucks. If software’s about freedom, freedom should be afforded to everyone, even those who work for corporations which have traditionally not maintained too many free software practices. When RMS and GNU talk about freedom, they also, admirably, force everyone using their software to respect the same sort of freedom, something which is good, but well the idea of restricting freedom to people who also uphold those same freedoms seems a little weird in this context/it prevents me from excersising such freedom in this context.

This shall not happen again, copylefting has issues with a lot of things I had never thought about. I like the ability to use somethings without caring about licensing, especially if they are freely available. It would make me happy if people started using the New BSD, the MIT/X, LGPL, or any of the other freer licenses. I really don’t care that much about the politics and such behind licensing and open source software distribution, but seeing as GPL 3 is going to be more restrictive than the current version is, having people change to something less restrictive is in by best interest, for now, and for later.

Ze Panda

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 18th, 2006 at 10:20 pm and is filed under CS, article. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.