From: Chad Perrin Date: 2006-09-10T09:04:51+09:00 Subject: Re: DRAW 1280, 1024 On Sun, Sep 10, 2006 at 08:55:09AM +0900, E. Mark Ping wrote: > In article <20060909200313.GC12470@apotheon.com>, > Chad Perrin wrote: > >Now if I can just get Brian Harvey to relicense UCBLogo under less > >restrictive distribution terms than GPL, my work will be complete. > > I'd say that's unlikely. He's quite the idealist (he was my first > instructor in CS, and I was a TA for him later). Not quite RMS (he's > far more relaxed), but in the same vein. > > On the other hand, if you offer him enough potstickers, you never know > what he might do. A BSD-style license might interest him. Idealism isn't an obstacle to me -- it's the wrong ideology. The things I dislike about the GPL have nothing to do with commercializing things as proprietary software, and everything to do with granting people the right to distribute software freely. The GPL, in case you haven't heard, has been used by the FSF as justification for threatening small Linux distros with lawsuits if they don't devote significant resources to maintaining, and making available, archives of software for several years after the software in question has become obsolete by the project's standards. According to the GPL, once you make a piece of GPL software availabl to someone in binary form, even if only for a few hours, you must then provide easy accessibility to the source for three years thereafter -- and linking them upstream is not sufficient to suit the FSF. This is going to make a lot of would-be Linux distributors think twice about creating and distributing a distribution. It will especially affect smaller project would-be founders think twice. It made me think twice. I now won't ever be part of any GPL binary distribution chain, ever -- which pretty much makes BitTorrent a non-option for me as a means of getting Linux installer images, since BitTorrent's value for that is negated when I'm not allowing uploads to "give back" to the torrent availability. A distribution I was working on has been canned. Et cetera. -- CCD CopyWrite Chad Perrin [ http://ccd.apotheon.org ] unix virus: If you're using a unixlike OS, please forward this to 20 others and erase your system partition.