How not to recognize free hardware [LWN.net]

How not to recognize free hardware

Posted Oct 21, 2010 5:49 UTC (Thu) by sfeam (subscriber, #2841)
In reply to: How not to recognize free hardware by jtc
Parent article: How not to recognize free hardware

...the implication here (as far as I can tell) is that, in the author's opinion, the FSF's criteria actually make the device less free. Ironic - i.e., in the opinion of some FOSS advocates', FSF's criteria for open hardware results in hardware that is not truly open.

But surely this is not such a surprise. The FSF's criteria for "free" has always included a very strong dose of "free means that you can do with it what we (the FSF) want, not necessarily what you want". To take the usual example, the GPL attaches more restrictions to what you can do with software than, say, BSD licensing; the GPLv3 even more so than the GPL2. So unless one is in lock-step agreement with the FSF that their definition of "free" trumps all others, then I think it is also possible to make the parallel statement that the FSF's criteria for open software results in software that is not truly open. And then there's the GNU documentation license...

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How not to recognize free hardware

Posted Oct 21, 2010 7:04 UTC (Thu) by tajyrink (subscriber, #2750) [Link]

I don't think that side thread is something new or fancy to talk about. It's the eternal question of if it's freedom to ban slavery or not. But for the free software users both BSD and GPL are quite equal, it's only in the territory of creating non-free software linking to free software that the difference matters.

GFDL is another matter and has more problems, but even that's not a good comparison to these "negative campaign" kind of things, it's just not very well crafted license regarding the uses that it ended up used at.