RMS Talk on The Free Software Movement(csclub.uwaterloo.ca)

5 pointsby crazyirish19 yıl önce4 comments

csclub.uwaterloo.ca

http://www.csclub.uwaterloo.ca/media/The%20Free%20Software%20Movement%20and%20GNULinux%20Operating%20System,%20a%20talk%20by%20Richard%20Stallman%20at%20UCSD.html

4 comments

lupin_sansei19 yıl önce

This is going to be unpopular, but it irks me that people say that GPLd software (not LGPL) is free as in speech (liberty). It's a little less free than speech, since I can't take GPLd code and combine it with my proprietary code. I understand why people might not want me to do this, but then you can't very well say I have liberty to use that code. It's limited freedom.

Don't get me wrong, I love GPL software, it's just not the last word in freedom. I can imagine freer software, LGPL or the Perl Artistic license for instance. Infact I wonder why free software needs a license at all? The ultimate freedom would be source you can do whatever you want with. With no license to tell you what you can or can't do with it.

dfranke19 yıl önce

You do need a license of some sort. BSD, MIT, and similar are about as minimal as is advisable. You need a disclaimer of warranty so that you're not liable if your software breaks someone's system, and the user's right to use your software needs to be conditional upon accepting the disclaimer.

lkozma19 yıl önce

You need these restrictions in order to protect your freedom. If GPL would allow combining code in proprietary code, someone could take your GPL-code, build a product out of it, release it under a proprietary license, then sue you for infringing his license.

lupin_sansei19 yıl önce

If this was true wouldn't people releasing code under other licenses such as the LGPL be getting sued now?