[tedks]

This is a shallow view of the situation.

Your metric is essentially "no knowledge is lost from the Free world." However, this means that all free software developers could die tomorrow and your metric would be satisfied.

A better metric is "the most free software that could be made is made." Switching from a GPLd compiler platform to a non-copyleft "freemium" Apple platform is worse for this.

If you don't care about free software as a political goal, there is no purpose to have this discussion in the first place, as you don't care about free software being hurt.

[mindcrime]

I think you're setting up a false dichotomy here. "You care" or "you don't care". Reality is more nuanced than that. Also, the idea of "all free software developers dying tomorrow' is just hyperbole, since the chances of that happening are essentially nil.

Yes, we'd all like to maximize the amount of F/OSS software in the world. F/OSS is a Good Thing, and I founded a company based around F/OSS for a reason. But it's not this horrible tragedy / affront to humanity, if Apple (or whoever) takes a step away from a purist "Free" software position.

To put it another way: no one owes you (or me, or anybody else) a world full of all the Free software we want. And even more so when plenty of people in the world don't care about software freedom. As long as those of us who do care have the option to fork and continue development of projects, then the actual freedom remains, as far as I'm concerned.

[tedks]

> Also, the idea of "all free software developers dying tomorrow' is just hyperbole, since the chances of that happening are essentially nil.

That is exactly my point. You proposed a metric for the health of the free software culture: "Nothing that is free now is non-free in the future." This is a bad metric because if you eliminate all free software development, it reports "everything is okay."

[mindcrime]

You proposed a metric for the health of the free software culture: "Nothing that is free now is non-free in the future."

It seems to me that you're turning something analog into something binary. "Nothing that is free now is non-free in the future" is true, relative to any particular project, and is - as a worst case - not so horrible. But applying that to "free software culture" in general, as a comparison to the idea of ALL free software development stopping, doesn't sound reasonable to me. It's like you're suggesting that, say, Apple, moving away from GPL'd "Free" software towards BSD software (and possibly a "free core" model) automatically implies that everybody else does too. But that's just as likely to happen as your hypothetical of every Free software developer dying tomorrow.

[tedks]

The "every free software developer dying tomorrow" is a hypothetical statement that has nothing at all to do with Apple. It was in my comment because it's a great way to illustrate that even if things aren't explicitly subtracted from the Free world, the Free world is harmed if its growth is slowed.

[mindcrime]

the Free world is harmed if its growth is slowed.

OK, but "harmed" is a broad term. I'm harmed if I stub my toe, but I'm also "harmed" if I fall of a bridge and land on my head and crack 4 vertebrae. But there's a big difference between those things.

And anyway, my point was (at least partly) that the growth doesn't necessarily stop because of - for example - the Apple deal (or something like it) because people can always fork. And if the last GPL'd version of something that goes closed is popular enough, it gets forked. See: Nessus[1] / OpenVAS[2].

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nessus_%28software%29

[2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenVAS