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GPL Militancy?

We are not the ones marking comments down for mentioning acronyms we dislike.

The GPL is the only open source license I trust to protect my interests.

Why do Microsoft and Sun hate the GPL? What are they so affraid of?

If giving away source code was so bad why is everyone trying to show me how they're being good "Open Source" kids and sharing nicely now that their stocks are in free fall? What changed? Did they suddenly start caring about us unpriveledged administrators and developers somewhere in their black abyss of a heart? No, they just couldn't find any other way to make money. Believe me, they tried all the other alternatives before turning to OSS.

This is not the path they would have chosen without the market pressure caused by the GPL. The GPL is forcing Microsoft and Sun to give away source code. Do you think that's unfair?

> The GPL is the only open source license I trust
> to protect my interests.

You have a right to your opinion. You do NOT have a right to claim that your opinion is the only valid one and try to force it on me like it is a holy religion. And this is where I part ways with the GPL militarists. Because the GPL militarists want to tell me how I have to license my code. And they can go to hell. It's my code. I will license it however I damn well please.

You hit the nail on the head.

Dave

Why do Microsoft and Sun hate the GPL? What are they so affraid of?

Sheesh, when will people learn? Sun isn't afraid of GPL, rumours are that the OpenSPARC will be GPL licensed..

The reason opensolaris is CDDL based is because there were parts of Solaris that Sun didn't own the IP rights to and could not go under the GPL. CDDL was developed to circumvent GPL limitations.

Without CDDL, there would be NO opensolaris!

Ahh dear, and I did expect the parent post to get modded down by the Sun fanboys. Since I can't reply to the parent post, I'll reply to yours.

I don't particularly care what the OSI thinks - they're in it from a business perspective, and the thing is businesses prefer the BSD style licenses to the GPL, purely because they can do whatever they want with it - take, rape the software and then close it all up and resell it for a nice profit, all without giving back to those that wrote the code originally! The GPL makes you give back to the very same community that spawned the software that you raped.

So, for all of the multitude of supposedly "open source" acceptable licenses that the OSI marks, I really don't care. As far as I'm concerned, and as many people are concerned, they aren't true open source unless they are GPL'd.

So, the parent poster has a very valid point - IBM releases stuff under the GPL, whereas Sun doesn't. I know which companies ethics I prefer.

The parent post should never have been modded down. It's not off topic, it wasn't rude or inflammatory, and it wasn't innaccurate either. So, pray do tell, why was it modded down? Because a bunch of Sun fanboys disagreed with it.

osnews.com has a fundamental problem in that modding down is not being monitored. Posts are being innappropriately modded down, by the very same people I'd say, over and over. This is basically abuse of the modding system, and these very people should either have the right to mod removed from their account, or banned. osnews.com has no intentions of doing this modding properly, and we're going to continue to see these types of posts being innappropriately modded down, the same as we still see lots of anonymous trolls.

Dave

> they're in it from a business perspective

So is Red Hat. They have shareholders to keep happy, who couldn't care less about open source. They only care about how much money Red Hat makes.

"As far as I'm concerned, and as many people are concerned, they aren't true open source unless they are GPL'd."

Good for you. No one gives a shit what you think. And militant zealots like you who promote GPL as if it were the one true religion that everyone will go to hell if they don't believe are the reason I (and many other old time Linux hackers) no longer participate in the Linux community very much and have moved on to other things (after having been very enthusiastic supporters in the pre-Slackware days). Because you assholes ruined it with your damn militarisitic "the holy GPL is the only true open source" bullshit.

Edited 2005-12-16 02:14

To some, anyone who doesn't agree with their opinion is a troll, anonymous or not.

A bit off-topic:

One reason I believe people prefer OSNews (myself included) is that it allows for occasionally expressing one's opinion, as it is all one does and infrequently, without publicly attempting to stigmatize the true value of Internet.

"So, the parent poster has a very valid point - IBM releases stuff under the GPL, whereas Sun doesn't. I know which companies ethics I prefer."

What a load of cobblers, what has IBM released under the GPL, maybe eclipse - oops no that's CPL, the cloudscape database, oops no that's under apache. IBM picks and chooses its licenses to suit its own commercial needs just as Sun does. BTW Sun released OpenOffice under the LGPL. I'm no Sun fanboy, but I don't understand why people insist that Sun is somehow IBM's evil twin. When it comes to the crunch both companies look after their respective shareholder foremost.