| >The fact that you consider performance and freedom to be a trade off means that you've already given up even the slightest hope of freedom. True, mostly thanks to shitty companies like Apple, Microsoft, Autodesk, etc. >You as a developer and a user should want the freedoms afforded to you by the GPL or any copyleft license for that matter. I do. >In the ideal world your high performance software would be released under the GPL you would have the best of both worlds. We don't live in an ideal world and never will. >The war won't be won by rewriting every single tool and releasing it under the GPL, it will be won by pressuring existing companies to license their software under the GPL. This doesn't work, especially in software for engineering where there are often sole, hegemonic powers and established monopolies and where the cost to enter the market as a new competitor is non-trivial. We're not talking a desktop manager or a text editor here, we're talking millions of dollars of R&D for things like CFD suites. Open alternatives exist (like, say, OpenFOAM) but they often lack accreditation/certification/rigorous testing and when you're dealing with people's lives the choice is often proscribed entirely. >The people who want non-copyleft licenses to succeed are those who which to make a profit from the control and ignorance they can impose on their users by closing their source and platform or those who are willing to trade their user's freedoms to appease them. There's a financial incentive to creating walled gardens and proprietary software that you can charge for. >yet people dismiss them because the company worth hundreds of billions of dollars has a better UX. When the choice is between "being able to function at my job, at all" and "use free software", well, the choice is clear. |