Date: Mon, 6 Apr 1998 02:22:45 -0600
From: rms@santafe.edu (Richard Stallman)
Subject: Copyleft: Pragmatic Idealism

		   Copyleft: Pragmatic Idealism

Every decision a person makes stems from the person's values and
goals.  People can have many different goals and values; fame, profit,
love, survival, fun, and freedom, are just some of the goals that a
good person might have.  When the goal is to help others as well as
oneself, we call that idealism.

My work on free software is motivated by an idealistic goal: spreading
freedom and cooperation.  I want to encourage free software to spread,
replacing proprietary software which forbids cooperation, and thus
make our society better.

That's the basic reason why the GNU General Public License is written
the way it is--as a copyleft.  All code added to a GPL-covered program
must be free software, even if it is put in a separate file.  I make
my code available for use in free software, and not for use in
proprietary software, in order to encourage other people who write
software to make it free as well.  I figure that since proprietary
software developers use copyright to stop us from sharing, we
cooperators can use copyright to give other cooperators an advantage
of their own: they can use our code.

Not everyone who uses the GNU GPL has this goal.  Many years ago, a
friend of mine was asked to rerelease a copylefted program under
non-copyleft terms, and he responded more or less like this:

    Sometimes I work on free software, and sometimes I work on
    proprietary software--but when I work on proprietary software, I
    expect to get *paid*.

He was willing to share his work with a community that shares
software, but saw no reason to give a handout to a business.  His goal
was different from mine, but he decided that the GNU GPL was useful
for his goal too.

If you want to accomplish something in the world, idealism is not
enough--you need to choose a method which works to achieve the goal.
In other words, you need to be "pragmatic."  Is the GPL pragmatic?
Let's look at its results.

Consider GNU C++.  Why do we have a free C++ compiler?  Only because
the GNU GPL said it had to be free.  GNU C++ was developed by an
industry consortium, MCC, starting from the GNU C compiler.  MCC
normally makes its work as proprietary as can be.  But they made the
C++ front end free software, because the GNU GPL said that was the
only way they could release it.  The C++ front end included many new
files, but since they were meant to be linked with GCC, the GPL
did applied to them.  The benefit to our community is evident.

Consider GNU Objective C.  NeXT initially wanted to make this front
end proprietary; they proposed to release it as .o files, and let
users link them with the rest of GCC, thinking this might be a way
around the GPL's requirements.  But our lawyer said that this would
not evade the requirements, that it was not allowed.  And so they made
the Objective C front end free software.

Those examples happened years ago, but the GNU GPL continues
to bring us more free software.

Many GNU libraries are covered by the GNU Library General Public
License, but not all.  One GNU library which is covered by the
ordinary GNU GPL is Readline, which implements command-line editing.
A month ago, I found out about a non-free program which was designed
to use Readline, and told the developer this was not allowed.  He
could have taken command-line editing out of the program, but what he
actually did was rerelease it under the GPL.  Now it is free software.

The programmers who write improvements to GCC (or Emacs, or Bash, or
Linux, or any GPL-covered program) are often employed by companies or
universities.  When the programmer wants to return his improvements to
the community, and see his code in the next release, the boss may say,
"Hold on there--your code belongs to us!  We don't want to share it;
we have decided to turn your improved version into a proprietary
software product."

Here the GNU GPL comes to the rescue.  The programmer shows the boss
that this proprietary software product would be copyright
infringement, and the boss realizes that he has only two choices:
release the new code as free software, or not at all.  Almost always
he lets the programmer do as he intended all along, and the code goes
into the next release.

The GNU GPL is not Mr. Nice Guy.  It says "no" to some of the things
that people sometimes want to do.  There are users who say that this
is a bad thing--that the GPL "excludes" some proprietary software
developers who "need to be brought into the free software community".

But we are not excluding them from our community; they are choosing
not to enter.  Their decision to make software proprietary is a
decision to stay out of our community.  Being in our community means
joining in cooperation with us; we cannot "bring them into our
community" if they don't want to join.

What we *can* do is offer them an inducement to join.  The GNU GPL is
designed to make an inducement from our existing software: "If you
will make your software free, you can use this code."  Of course, it
won't win 'em all, but it wins some of the time.

Proprietary software development does not contribute to our community,
but its developers often want handouts from us.  Free software users
can offer free software developers strokes for the ego--recognition
and gratitude--but it can be very tempting when a business tells you,
"Just let us put your package in our proprietary program, and your
program will be used by many thousands of people!"  The temptation can
be powerful, but in the long run we are all better off if we resist
it.

The temptation and pressure are harder to recognize when they come
indirectly, through free software organizations that have adopted a
policy of catering to proprietary software.  The X Consortium (and its
successor, the Open Group) offers an example: funded by companies that
made proprietary software, they have strived for a decade to persuade
programmers not to use copyleft.  Now that the Open Group has made
X11R6.4 non-free software, those of us who resisted that pressure are
glad that we did.

Pragmatically speaking, thinking about greater long-term goals will
strengthen your will to resist this pressure.  If you focus your mind
on the freedom and community that you can build by staying firm, you
will find the strength to do it.  "Stand for something, or you will
fall for nothing."

And if cynics ridicule freedom, ridicule community...if "hard nosed
realists" say that profit is the only ideal...just ignore them, and
use copyleft all the same.