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by lelanthran 722 days ago
> If BSD wasn't available under terms Sony liked, they'd be using QNX or something more obscure and just as inaccessible to their users.

That's the point: if they don't want to contribute their changes back, they should spend their own money writing their own software.

Right now, they'd take thousands of hours of effort from the community, add a few hundred of their own and then close off the product from the very community that they so willingly took this charity from. Yay BSD license!

If they had to use QNX or similar, they'd pay to do it. If they had to use GPL, they'd pay to close off their changes, which would be great for funding more free software.

> For better or worse, all the big console manufacturers see their ability to lock down their platform as vital to their development and business strategies. Vital to their ability to charge $60 for a few gigabytes of 1s and 0s.

Well that's why I divided the licenses into "pro-user" and "pro-corporate". The BSDs are pro-corporate.
1 comments
timschmidt 722 days ago
> If they had to use QNX or similar, they'd pay to do it. If they had to use GPL, they'd pay to close off their changes, which would be great for funding more free software.

Last I checked there were about a thousand open source OSes. Hundreds under BSD-like licenses. Here's a partial list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_BSD_operating_systems

It sounds like you're advocating for wiping them all from history and outlawing everything but GPL licensed code, which just isn't possible, nor desirable. Sorry?

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lelanthran 722 days ago
> It sounds like you're advocating for wiping them all from history and outlawing everything but GPL licensed code, which just isn't possible, nor desirable.

That's a strawman: Nothing I said implied any sort of genocide.

I'm pointing out that the pro-user license has more benefits than the pro-corporate licenses.

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timschmidt 722 days ago
> That's a strawman

Is there another reading of "If they had to use" that I'm not aware of? Seems to imply force either through legal or practical means.

> the pro-user license has more benefits than the pro-corporate licenses

I'm a user and a developer and neither of those descriptions seem to apply to the licenses being discussed. I benefit from both, as do you, as does the whole world.

I bet proprietary software vendors get a real chuckle out of this sort of infighting.

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lelanthran 721 days ago
> Is there another reading of "If they had to use" that I'm not aware of?

Well, yes.

You started your argument with "If BSD wasn't available they'd be using QNX".

So I followed on from that with "If they had to use QNX... If they had to use GPL..."

I was just following the logical outcome of your "If BSD wasn't available" argument, not advocating that BSD must not be available.

> I'm a user and a developer and neither of those descriptions seem to apply to the licenses being discussed.

I don't know how you can think that "pro-user" doesn't apply to the GPL - it's the singular goal of the GPL to protect user freedoms. This has never been ambiguous.

GPL == freedom for the user. It's always been this way. This is nothing new. You cannot, with a straight face and at this point in the conversation, claim that you didn't know the goal of the GPL.

As far as the pro-corporate aspect of BSD, that's pretty clear to me, because of how extensively corporations were able to mine BSD code for shareholder benefit.

So, yeah, with BSD, you might argue differently (for example, argue that corporate mining of BSD code is a side-effect), but there is no way to argue that GPL isn't pro-user.

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timschmidt 721 days ago
> GPL == freedom for the user. It's always been this way. This is nothing new. You cannot, with a straight face and at this point in the conversation, claim that you didn't know the goal of the GPL

Your words. My words indicate that I see both licenses and being pro-everyone.

> As far as the pro-corporate aspect of BSD, that's pretty clear to me, because of how extensively corporations were able to mine BSD code for shareholder benefit.

Mining is an ecologically destructive activity which bears no resemblance to using software under the terms which it was licensed.

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