if copyright assignment is so evil, why don't you oppose FSF requiring it?

Posted Feb 1, 2010 4:06 UTC (Mon) by elanthis (guest, #6227)
In reply to: if copyright assignment is so evil, why don't you oppose FSF requiring it? by AndreE
Parent article: Canonical copyright assignment policy 'same as others' (ITWire)

RMS and the FSF have actively held back the improvement of developers'
lives out of an insane need for arbitrary Freedom (look how long it took for
GCC to get plugin support), and that alone makes them wholly untrustworthy
to me.

if copyright assignment is so evil, why don't you oppose FSF requiring it?

Posted Feb 1, 2010 5:06 UTC (Mon) by quotemstr (subscriber, #45331) [Link] (3 responses)

Without the FSF, we wouldn't have a high-quality free compiler at all.

if copyright assignment is so evil, why don't you oppose FSF requiring it?

Posted Feb 1, 2010 5:26 UTC (Mon) by nevyn (guest, #33129) [Link] (2 responses)

> Without the FSF, we wouldn't have a high-quality free compiler at all.

That's obviously false, it's like saying without the FSF we wouldn't have a
high-quality free editor. Yes, RMS and the FSF helped GCC along and it is
still the de-facto free compiler but other people have written compilers and
Cygnus (and others) have put a huge amount of effort into it.

if copyright assignment is so evil, why don't you oppose FSF requiring it?

Posted Feb 1, 2010 10:08 UTC (Mon) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454) [Link]

You can't oppose the FSF and Cygnus.

Cygnus (and now Red Hat) have largely been successful because they've embraced the GPL and worked with the FSF instead of trying to cross it as many others did and still try to do.

Some people are so set in their no-FSF or no-RMS world they do not realise that in practice working with the FSF or RMS is not the disaster they paint.

if copyright assignment is so evil, why don't you oppose FSF requiring it?

Posted Feb 2, 2010 5:19 UTC (Tue) by SEJeff (guest, #51588) [Link]

fwiw, between pcc from the bsd camp and llvm, we have healthy competition for
gcc. Granted gcc is still light years ahead of both, but we have competition.
In the end, competition is good for all free or not.

if copyright assignment is so evil, why don't you oppose FSF requiring it?

Posted Feb 1, 2010 5:39 UTC (Mon) by AndreE (guest, #60148) [Link]

I never claimed that it was solution to solve all problems.

Ultimately though, the FSF didn't just decide to make new releases of GCC under a less free license, like any commercial entity might consider. In fact, their zeal is appealing to me. You may consider it "arbitrary" freedom, but having entities that place the freedom of software as their primary concern are obviously the entities mostly like to always protect these freedoms.