<story><title>Why I am pro-GPL</title><url>http://dustycloud.org/blog/why-i-am-pro-gpl/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>epistasis</author><text>And that&amp;#x27;s a great thing to care about, and a great reason to create a license. The secondary question is: which license is best at perpetuating user freedom? This is a separate question than that of whether users &lt;i&gt;should&lt;/i&gt; have freedom to mess with code. IMHO, the GPL is not the best license for perpetuating the most user freedom. Many people disagree with me on this, but their disagreement usually comes down to &amp;quot;the GPL is best for user freedom because it was created for user freedom and RMS is talking about user freedom.&amp;quot; I&amp;#x27;m not yet convinced that MIT-like, BSD-like, and Apache-like are any worse at perpetuating user freedom, and may in fact be far better at perpetuating user freedom due to their greater acceptance.</text></item><item><author>TazeTSchnitzel</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s worth remembering why the GPL was invented.&lt;p&gt;Stallman had a printer which had proprietary drivers, and he wanted to fix an issue with the driver. He couldn&amp;#x27;t. He created the GPL so that, in future, people wouldn&amp;#x27;t have this problem.&lt;p&gt;Stallman created the GPL because he cared about user freedom.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jbk</author><text>&amp;gt; I&amp;#x27;m not yet convinced that MIT-like, BSD-like, and Apache-like are any worse at perpetuating user freedom, and may in fact be far better at perpetuating user freedom due to their greater acceptance.&lt;p&gt;Well, the GPL mandates the right to use the application, and that a redistributor cannot restrict it (section 0, preambule and section 6, IIRC); that right is not guaranteed by MIT, BSD, MPL or Apache.</text></comment>
<story><title>Why I am pro-GPL</title><url>http://dustycloud.org/blog/why-i-am-pro-gpl/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>epistasis</author><text>And that&amp;#x27;s a great thing to care about, and a great reason to create a license. The secondary question is: which license is best at perpetuating user freedom? This is a separate question than that of whether users &lt;i&gt;should&lt;/i&gt; have freedom to mess with code. IMHO, the GPL is not the best license for perpetuating the most user freedom. Many people disagree with me on this, but their disagreement usually comes down to &amp;quot;the GPL is best for user freedom because it was created for user freedom and RMS is talking about user freedom.&amp;quot; I&amp;#x27;m not yet convinced that MIT-like, BSD-like, and Apache-like are any worse at perpetuating user freedom, and may in fact be far better at perpetuating user freedom due to their greater acceptance.</text></item><item><author>TazeTSchnitzel</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s worth remembering why the GPL was invented.&lt;p&gt;Stallman had a printer which had proprietary drivers, and he wanted to fix an issue with the driver. He couldn&amp;#x27;t. He created the GPL so that, in future, people wouldn&amp;#x27;t have this problem.&lt;p&gt;Stallman created the GPL because he cared about user freedom.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>phkahler</author><text>&amp;gt;&amp;gt; I&amp;#x27;m not yet convinced that MIT-like, BSD-like, and Apache-like are any worse at perpetuating user freedom, and may in fact be far better at perpetuating user freedom due to their greater acceptance.&lt;p&gt;Just try to get source code to any of the Apple or Microsoft OS parts that were BSD licensed so you can tweak them. Then come back and tell me how free you feel. I know you probably don&amp;#x27;t have a desire to change most of that, but my point is that you can&amp;#x27;t - for the parts that were changed from their BSD origins with no source released.</text></comment>