> Just one question, out of curiosity: are you aware that the implicit goal
> of Richard Stallman's philosophy is the elimination of non-free software,
> and if so, do you agree with this goal?
My answer to this is a qualified "yes." Yes, I would prefer a state of
existence in which all software was voluntarily free. I am not, however,
in favor of a software gestapo running around trying to force people to be
free; this leads to a familiar Rousseauvian nightmare. In the first case,
though, there would really be no further need for licensing, and the
BSD/GPL discussion would become irrelevant. My viewpoint on this is not
limited to software; rather, it extends to useful information in general.
If I discover a cure for cancer, I'm going to tell the world about it,
rather than keep it a secret and charge a million dollars per patient.
The more secrets we(people, collectively) keep, the more time we waste
rediscovering, reinventing, redebugging, and rethinking.
> To me, a state of freedom includes the right to create proprietary and/or
> closed source software if one desires, and to use any license desired.
Yes, but IMO, to do so is to be selfish.
> If you agree with that idea, then this debate is mostly academic;
Well, this debate is academic whether I agree or not; I'm not going to
stand over you with a hatchet, forcing you to GPL all your software.
> as long
> as we all have the right to choose our licensing terms, then developers
> will devote their efforts to whatever camp they agree with, businesses
> will use whatever license is most advantageous to them, etc. Everyone's
> happy, except for the people who want to force a particular license on the
> world.
>
> Considering that free software existed before there was a Free Software
> Foundation or GPL, and that BSD has survived for decades despite having a
> license "vulnerable" to exploitation, I remain unconvinced by the argument
> that free software can't survive without a GPL-ish license.
In the early days of computing, there was no need for software licensing.
Programs were like other academic discoveries, and were communicated to
others as items of interest for experimentation. It was not until someone
discovered that they could put software on some portable medium and sell
it that the idea of software secrecy began to abound.
Indeed, free software may be able to survive without the GPL or similar
licensing schemes, but will it thrive?
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