ESR: 'We Don't Need the GPL Anymore' (O'ReillyNet)
Posted Jul 2, 2005 12:51 UTC (Sat) by
job (subscriber, #670)
Parent article:
ESR: 'We Don't Need the GPL Anymore' (O'ReillyNet)
Raymond wasted many dead trees on his writings on what defines hackerdom,
coincidentally they all match his own values, long before the Linux
phenomenon, and many people are still angry with what de did to the
Hacker's Dictionary. He was lucky to catch the Linux updrift and one of
his papers caught on.
Thank you for that paper. It was a short and very interesting read. The
people who managed to configure and use fetchmail also thank you for
that. Now will you please stop comparing everything you see with that
software and every other people with your own image of yourself? Pretty
please?
He has for many years some sort of campaign against Stallman. Perhaps
because they share vastly different political views personally (which
might help explain why it is so important for him to define hackerdom).
It is also interesting how quickly he buddied up with Torvalds, while the
connection may not be entirely symmetrical, as he must have ways to
connect with other people. One paper and a mail fetching script may not
be enough to get your voice heard.
As for the license in question, Stallman knows what he's doing. He has
laid the foundation for the GNU project and his enormous work on the GPL
is part of the reason why we can run a free software desktop and still be
accessing almost all of the same services the rest of society uses.
There is enough empirical evidence that its role is important, and when a
company gives code to the Linux project, they need to be able to explain
to the shareholders why their competitors can't embrace and extend it. It
is likely that license is the reason that the dot com boom didn't focus
on FreeBSD, which at the time was more stable. There are exceptions such
as the Apache project, but as a daemon it is limited in scope and without
the economic value of Linux.
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