61 lines
2.9 KiB
Markdown
61 lines
2.9 KiB
Markdown
# Re: FreeBSD, Clang and GCC: Copyleft vs. Community
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I recently received a comment via e-mail from a fellow GNU hacker Antonio
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Diaz, who is the author and maintainer of [GNU Ocrad][0], a [free (as in
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freedom)][1] optical character recognition (OCR) program. His comment was in
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response to my article entitled [FreeBSD, Clang and GCC: Copyleft vs.
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Community][2], which details the fundamental difference in philosophy
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between free software and "open source".
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[0]: https://www.gnu.org/software/ocrad/ocrad.html
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[1]: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
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[2]: /2013/08/freebsd-clang-and-gcc-copyleft-vs-community
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I found Antonio's perspective to be enlightening, so I asked for his
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permission to share it here.
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> I imagine a world where all the Free Software is GPLed. The amount and
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> usefulness of Free Software grows incesantly because free projects can
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> reuse the code of previous free projects. Proprietary software is
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> expensive because every company has to write most of its "products" from
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> scratch. Most people use Free Software, and proprietary software is mainly
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> used for specialized tasks for which no free replacement exists yet.
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>
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> Now I imagine a world where all the Free Software is really "open source"
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> (BSD license). Free Software is restricted to the operating system and
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> basic aplications because the license does not guarantee reciprocity.
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> Proprietary software is cheap to produce because it is built using the
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> code of free projects, but it is expensive for the user (in money and
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> freedom) because there is no real competition from Free Software. Most
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> people use proprietary software, as Free Software is too basic for most
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> tasks.
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>
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> I think "open source" organizations (specially BSD) are wilfully
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> destroying the long-term benefits for society of the GPL, and they are
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> doing it for short-term benefits like popularity and greed:
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>
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> "As these companies devise strategies for dealing with GPLv3, so must the
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> FreeBSD community - strategies that capitalize on this opportunity to
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> increase adoption of FreeBSD." "Fundraising Update [...] This has
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> increased the number of people actively approaching companies to make
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> large contributions."
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>
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> https://www.freebsdfoundation.org/press/2007Aug-newsletter.shtml
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>
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> Human beings have an innate sense of justice. In absence of reciprocity
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> one wants to be paid, but I think that reciprocity is much better for
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> society in the long term.[^3]
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Antonio compels us to think toward the future: while developers releasing
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their code under permissive licenses like the [Modified BSD License][4] are
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still making a generous contribution to the free software community today,
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it may eventually lead to negative consequences by empowering non-free
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software tomorrow.
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[^3]: Comment by Antonio Diaz; the only modifications made were for
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formatting.
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[4]: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#ModifiedBSD
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