Not willing to accept popularity at the cost of users' privacy

Posted Sep 23, 2006 11:51 UTC (Sat) by emk (subscriber, #1128)
In reply to: My projects will be migrated to GPLv3 by ehlarson
Parent article: Kernel developers' position on GPLv3

"What is going to be the impact of adopting GPLv3? You wont have anyone using your software."

Hey, I'm giving the software away for free, right? If I'm not willing to compromise my user's freedom and privacy to make my software popular, that's my ethical choice. If TIVO wants to make DRMed spyware that logs every show a user watches, then they can do it without my help.

I'm very sensitive to privacy issues, and I don't believe that consumer electronics should tattle back to the mothership 24 hours a day. At least with the anti-DRM provisions in GPLv3, you'll always be able to buy cheapo generic hardware (from some bottom-feeder without a software budget), and hack out the spyware and tattletales.

The Linux kernel team's opinion on GPLv3 is moot, anyway--they removed the upgrade clause from the GPLv2 boilerplate, so they'll never be able to use the GPLv3, anyway. But as a developer, I'm glad that GPLv3 tries to preserve the four freedoms for my users.