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by tedks 4853 days ago
> 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."
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mindcrime 4853 days ago
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.

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tedks 4853 days ago
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.
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mindcrime 4853 days ago
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

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