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by DuskStar 2450 days ago
> We don't have to be friendly to those who would want to use our software to take freedom away from others. We should be friendly to everyone who wants to use our software freely, regardless of their skill level.

"We should be friendly, unless we don't like the people using our software"
1 comments
shadowgovt 2450 days ago
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance

In the specific case of free software, the paradox of tolerance plays out concretely, in that failure to enforce copyleft on software can lead to the creation of software derived from that work that is itself copyrighted in such a way that the deriver could sue an original source creator deriving work from their derivations.

I don't think anyone would consider copyleft enforcement "friendly," but the alternative is "free software has no ability to protect its core tenants," so some friendliness must be abridged.

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DuskStar 2449 days ago
I agree that enforcing copyleft licenses is extremely necessary. My thought here was that "those who would want to use our software to take freedom away from others" is a bit too broad to apply to just that, especially when considering things like the recent Chef outage.

In other words - some people are going to use GNU software to take freedom from others (imagine a prison running Linux, etc) in ways that conform with the license. I do not think GNU should oppose this.

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