Free software is pretty much the opposite of proprietary software, yes, and GPL is the single license that enabled the free software revolution we are all benefiting from.
Sure, the battle against greed is far from over, but the benefits are already quite obvious.
If people and companies had kept to proprietary EULA and BSD as the only options, we would still be in the dire situation we were in the 90s.
>Free software is pretty much the opposite of proprietary software, yes, and GPL is the single license that enabled the free software revolution we are all benefiting from.
I call BS. GPL just happened to have the GNU stack with it. If the same toolchain (gcc, etc) were released as BSD/MIT from the beginning, it would have been just as well or better.
GNU was created on the basis of the GPL. It's not an accident that the "GNU stack had the GPL", it was a plan from the beginning to create a system which people could use in freedom. The toolchain would not exist if Stallman hadn't made the decision that user freedom was something he should work towards. And we wouldn't have any free software without GNU, because that's what the world was heading towards in the 70s and 80s. BSD would still be proprietary, since Stallman talked to Berkeley to convince the developers to release their improvements to Unix.
>GNU was created on the basis of the GPL. It's not an accident that the "GNU stack had the GPL", it was a plan from the beginning to create a system which people could use in freedom.
The accident was that the plan was conceived by Stallman and involved GNU/GPL.
What I'm saying is a similar plan with BSD/MIT licenses, if it was initiated by another guy first, would be just as good.
In other words that the reason GNU/OSS got that far was that they provided software people needed at the right time -- not because they were GPL as opposed to BSD licensd.
What makes you so sure that, had the GNU stack been BSD/MIT licensed and as popular, that Microsoft etc. would not have come out with products featuring the same software but with proprietary extensions and closed licenses?
>What makes you so sure that, had the GNU stack been BSD/MIT licensed and as popular, that Microsoft etc. would not have come out with products featuring the same software but with proprietary extensions and closed licenses?
Was makes you so sure that it would matter? The original software will still be there and free for any modification one would want to do.
A majority (if not most) of the contributions to the Linux kernel come from developers paid to do so by the likes of Intel, Google, IBM etc. [1]. Do you have any reason to believe that said for-profit companies would have contributed to the same degree to a BSD/MIT licensed Linux kernel instead of focusing on a Linux kernel with proprietary extensions under a closed license?
it would have been absurd to write that toolchain with a "kind of free" license. why would RMS bother? it's not like he didn't have access to existing software.
i'm guessing you think that's just "incidental"... but that's a very strange argument to ever make if you think anything has any explanatory power at all.
>it would have been absurd to write that toolchain with a "kind of free" license. why would RMS bother? it's not like he didn't have access to existing software.
BSD/MIT is not "kind of free". It's freer (more people can do more things) than the GPL.
that depends on your opinions regarding free software. people who support the GPL would probably call BSD/MIT less free, because the software is "free, for now," or "free, for me." that might not be good enough for actual freedom to be maintained, along the lines they're thinking about freedom.
i'm not going to argue about that though. surely you're familiar with the territory.
the point, though, is that the GNU ethos is the reason for the GNU tools, and the onus would be on you to show that that ethos was interchangeable with some other in order to get where we are today.
when you're explaining an event in history, you need to take the facts and look for "why did things happen this way after that particular event?" you can't just substitute a comparable event and say "everything would be the same." if we're talking about the legal basis of this or that for the GPL and BSD licenses, sure, you can interchange things and show that "here, in this case, you'd be regretting GPL, and in this case [etc etc etc]." but for the course of history, you actually have to be much more careful with your scope... it's unlikely that one change (one that the primary person involved, RMS, himself took to be the central point of all it) could have no effects, or no salient ones.
notice how these points are distinct. RMS wouldn't but have written the GPL. history worked out how it did. these are different than your or my opinions on the merits of varying degrees of permissiveness in licenses.
That depends on your goals and definitions, of course. The goal of the GPL is to ensure freedom of the code, by placing demands on the distributor. The BSD license does not do this, so a developer is "more free" with BSD-licensed code. However, the code is "more free" when it's GPL-licensed.
Which you prefer is a personal choice, but it's kinda pointless to argue which one is "more free" as the licenses have different interpretations of freedom.
Sure, the battle against greed is far from over, but the benefits are already quite obvious.
If people and companies had kept to proprietary EULA and BSD as the only options, we would still be in the dire situation we were in the 90s.