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On C|Net News, Jonathan Zuck of the Association for Competitive Technology likens Richard Stallman's crusade for GPLv3 to Savonarola's Bonfire of the Vanities in 15th century Florence.
Like Savonarola, Richard Stallman takes a similarly religious stance on software development, rather than a practical one. For Stallman, the concept that software be "free, as in freedom" is the only concern in the creation of software. In fact, he has declared that "it is far more important that software be free than that it be better." This has led him to view the open-source software community, a related but practically minded version of the free software community, with skepticism and frequently with disdain.
He points out that there is a serious fracture line in the open source community between the purist and the practical:
To meet the needs of the heterogeneous market, this community has focused many of its efforts on building bridges between open/free software and proprietary products. Under GPL 2, companies have found many ways to create these types of hybrid systems. Today, Linux distributions from Red Hat, Suse and others include many pieces of proprietary and nonfree code. But this "mixing" has not been without its detractors. For leading Linux users like TiVo and Adaptec, the ability to protect key intellectual property is essential. But this protection is a direct assault on Stallman's version of freedom and the need to share software with the community. How do you balance the promotional value of high-profile Linux implementations against the philosophical compromise? We on this humble weblog agree with Jonathan -- search for "GPL" over the past two months to explore why. But, as might be expected, the C|Net News comments on his piece reflect a lively difference of opinion.
posted by James DeLong @ 8:42 AM | Software
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