Linked by Thom Holwerda on Fri 31st Aug 2007 19:24 UTC, submitted by Anonymous
The latest issue of the FreeBSD newsletter contains a letter from the Vice President of the FreeBSD Foundation about the GPLv3. "On June 29th, the Free Software Foundation unveiled version 3 of the GNU General Public license. Even though the majority of software included in the FreeBSD distribution is not covered by any version of the GPL, our community cannot ignore this very popular license or its most recent incarnation. Through extremely successful evangelization, and the popularity of Linux, the misconception that OpenSource and the GPL are synonymous has become pervasive."
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Member since:
2005-07-08
Why would you be concerned with my supposed "attack on religion" if you claim that FSF is not about religion?
Because freedom is contingent upon people being able to hold personal beliefs without being attacked for being different. It's one thing to argue the merits of various belief systems. It's entirely another thing to suggest that beliefs are wrong because they are different.
If you read back what you wrote, I don't see any rational arguments against the GPL. All I see is a vague, rambling argument about how morality has no place in software licensing. May I ask why not?
I suppose you don't have a problem with proprietary licenses, which basically take away all of your rights to do anything except use your copy of the software in approved ways. But a license that offers the right to share and improve software except in ways that infringe on others' rights to do the same? That's moralist, utopian, and/or religious mumbo-jumbo.
That's like an anarchist arguing that a libertarian is a radical moralist for holding that his right to swing his fist stops at her nose.
Finally, there is a technical reason for why Tivo can't easily switch to FreeBSD. There's an extreme lack of video input support on FreeBSD compared to Linux. No V4L, no DVB, and as far as I can tell, no video over USB or Firewire either. FreeBSD video input seems to be limited to some cards based on a particular Conexant MPEG encoder. HD need not apply.
So if FreeBSD is looking to court consumer electronics vendors like Tivo, they have a lot of work to do to bring their driver support up to speed.