| GCC's position [is] rather obvious: They want to support free tools I don't have a strong position either, but unless you work for the FSF in their PR department, software developers should really be stating the FSF's position accurately, which is: The Free Software Foundation only want to promote free^H^H^H^HFree Software Foundation-licensed tools, primarily tools that use its GPL license. To the FSF, "free" is just a shorthand way of saying "Free Software Foundation-licensed". It doesn't mean "free" as normally understood. Just because the FSF wants to conflate the two to obscure what's going on doesn't mean the rest of the world should go along with the ruse. (And it is clearly non-standard, which is easily demonstrated by how often FSF people have to explain what "free" means. As they say in politics, if you're explaining, you're losing. If there was no difference from the standard usage, no explanation would be needed. Therefore, the FSF usage is non-standard. QED) FWIW I doubt anyone has a problem with the FSF's actual mission, since people are free (normal usage) to do what they want (and even encouraged to do so). It's the rhetorical duplicity of their PR that we shouldn't be supporting. Let the FSF's mission stand on it's own merits, rather than by trying to gain credibility/respectability by association with something else (in this case, our pre-existing affinity for freedom). |
Not entirely true; the FSF recognizes lots of other licenses as "free".
Its true that the FSF thinks that its licenses are the most appropriate for promoting software freedom.
I think they're wrong: if you can convince people that Free Software has value, you don't need a copyleft license forcing them to give back, and if you can't convince them of that, a copyleft license doesn't help you get them to create free software, it just prevents them from engaging with it at all, gets them to commit to an alternative, and makes them less likely to to commit back even if they later realize a value in Free (since if they commit to a non-Free third-party alternative, the cost of switching it out is higher.)