On Thu, Nov 01, 2001 at 09:31:50PM +0100, squeak-dev-request at lists.squeakfoundation.org wrote:
> Date: Thu, 1 Nov 2001 08:05:05 -0500
> Subject: Re: What's "Linking" under the GPL?
> From: "Andrew C. Greenberg" <werdna at mucow.com>
> To: squeak-dev at lists.squeakfoundation.org
> 
> Well, not to support the analogy, but there is little doubt that "free 
> software" engineered so you can't do things with it isn't particularly 
> free.  The use, indeed pedantic insistence by RMS, on using newspeak in 
> lieu of English and reason to describe things proves this more clearly 
> than anything else.  With all due respect, the authoritarian regime of 
> the GPL, whose function is to constrain and limit what may be done with 
> the software, as opposed to the Berkeley license, whose primary function 
> is to pass the software along, shifting risk to the licensee, reserving 
> the bare bones minimum obligation of acknowledgment, makes clear to all 
> which is the free license.

The only thing the GPL prevents you from doing is *LIMITING OTHER
PEOPLE'S ABILITY TO USE AND MODIFY THE SOFTWARE*.

It's equivalent to a philosophical argument over which country is more
free -- a country which has laws against slavery, or a country which
has no laws against slavery?  The latter is more limiting, but the
former, many would say, is "freer."

So I'm not so much saying you're wrong here as that a strong argument
can be made either way because the question is in itself paradoxical.

Sorry to bring yet another "government analogy" into play.  I agree
that the initial government analogy wasn't particularly useful.  I
just find attacks on the GPL as not being "really free" because it
doesn't allow you to remove people's freedom to use and modify the
software by slapping a proprietary license on it to be sophistical.

But as I said before, the GPL is really designed for c/unixlike
code, and its application to something like a Smalltalk image is
problematic; that's a known issue to the FSF and something they want
to try to fix in a future version.  I do not know whether they will
succeed.  Perhaps the GPL will never be the "right" license for
Squeak.  But it doesn't sound like a GPL-compatible one will be
impossible if Apple allows it.

You're quite right that the GPL is all about trying to bring about
a world of non-proprietary software, and if you do not share that
vision, you should not be using the license.

-- 
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"A. We're not evil.  B. We're not an empire."
 --Steve Ballmer of Microsoft, lying through his teeth
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Ed Heil ....................... uncorrected at yahoo.com
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