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by belorn 4506 days ago
The free software movement was created to stop the proprietary software model. It is the reason the movement was created.

For profit companies are created in order to create profit. Environmentalism was created to regarding concerns for environmental conservation and improvement of the health of the environment. Police was created to stop criminals.

Organizations has goals, and they want to achieve them. Permissive license both helps the free software movement, but also makes their goal harder to achieve, thus they favor Copyleft licenses which only helps the free software movement. It doesn't make permissive bad, wrong, evil or any other labels like that. It simply is not as good as copyleft for achieving the free software movements goal.

In what way is this surprising?
2 comments
stephenr 4506 days ago
RMS doesn't just "favour" GPL licensed code - he actively rejects objectively better code and even rejects collaborating with other projects, simply because they are not GPL licensed.

So, how is that not calling something "bad"?

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stephenr 4506 days ago
Further-more, (i knew i'd find the damn quote eventually):

> Writing non-free software is not an ethically legitimate activity, so if people who do this run into trouble, that's good! All businesses based on non-free software ought to fail, and the sooner the better.

http://lists.kde.org/?l=kde-licensing&m=89249041326259&w=2

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teddyh 4505 days ago
What? That quote does not support your claim either. What the quote calls “non-free” software is proprietary software. BSD licensed software is, on the contrary, free software.

I have seen hints of this misconception before, but is this really a common thing? Do some people really believe that “free software” is exclusively GPL software?

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stephenr 4505 days ago
I'll accept your point, but the FSF messaging about this is not clear - one one page it lists BSD as "a free software licence" but on another identifies it separately (both in text and in a diagram) to "free software".

Either way, RMS comments/actions re: BSD licensed code still don't match up with the "official" policy.

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teddyh 4505 days ago
Link, please?
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