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Where do we stand 30 years after the founding of the Free Software Foundation? (Opensource.com)

[Posted February 17, 2015 by ris]

Opensource.com has an interview with John Sullivan, Executive Director of FSF. "I stay involved because I think it's one of the most important social movements in existence, and it needs help—a lot of help. As more and more of the world's social, cultural, economic, and political interactions are mediated by technology, control over the technology becomes incredibly important for the exercise of any basic individual freedoms. I love the people I meet in this work, and the enormity of the challenge."
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Where do we stand 30 years after the founding of the Free Software Foundation? (Opensource.com)

Posted Feb 18, 2015 13:56 UTC (Wed) by ncm (guest, #165) [Link] (6 responses)

What is new, vs 30 years ago, is multinational corporations simultaneously utterly dependent on Free Software, and utterly contemptuous of the principles that allow them to be. Certainly the law and our licenses allow such behavior, but that doesn't mean we are obliged to ignore it or to make excuses for them.

Where do we stand 30 years after the founding of the Free Software Foundation? (Opensource.com)

Posted Feb 18, 2015 20:29 UTC (Wed) by k8to (guest, #15413) [Link] (5 responses)

An honest question: What does not-ignoring it look like?

Protests?
A wall (webpage) of shame?
Education/outreach?

It's common to encounter people in my small (over 1000 now) company who have no real reason to be contemptuous of free software who get all huffy about how the GPL is all anti-business so it's worthless. I don't really understand the roots of this viewpoint so I engage with discussion and usually opinions are moved but it still baffles me.

More copyleft is precisely the answer.

Posted Feb 18, 2015 22:43 UTC (Wed) by coriordan (guest, #7544) [Link] (3 responses)

More copyleft is precisely the answer.

They want to take, and they're running anti-GPL campaigns to avoid giving back. "Not-ignoring it" means insisting on copyleft licences.

More copyleft is precisely the answer.

Posted Feb 19, 2015 0:54 UTC (Thu) by ncm (guest, #165) [Link] (1 responses)

More copyleft is probably the most useful response.

Individual BSDers have a what must seem like a legitimate gripe with GPL projects: they want to be able to change jobs/contracts and bring their code along. If it's GPL and copyright-assigned, they maybe can't pull it into the next proprietary code base when they move on. This ignores that if the code is "work for hire", they can't re-use it, anyway, unless it was put upstream somewhere.

Of course no shadow of this consideration applies to the multinational free-riders. They have no excuses. The scrupulous among us will avoid them, leaving them to hire from among the unscrupulous, and get the help they deserve.

More copyleft is precisely the answer.

Posted Feb 26, 2015 8:58 UTC (Thu) by gvy (guest, #11981) [Link]

Interesting observation, thanks.

More copyleft is precisely the answer.

Posted Feb 19, 2015 0:55 UTC (Thu) by ncm (guest, #165) [Link]

More copyleft is probably the most useful response.

Individual BSDers have a what must seem like a legitimate gripe with GPL projects: they want to be able to change jobs/contracts and bring their code along. If it's GPL and copyright-assigned, they maybe can't pull it into the next proprietary code base when they move on. This ignores that if the code is "work for hire", they can't re-use it, anyway, unless it was put upstream somewhere.

Of course no shadow of this consideration applies to the multinational free-riders. They have no excuses. The scrupulous among us will avoid them, leaving them to hire from among the unscrupulous, and get the help they deserve.

Where do we stand 30 years after the founding of the Free Software Foundation? (Opensource.com)

Posted Feb 18, 2015 22:57 UTC (Wed) by n0w (guest, #98242) [Link]

I like to think that Education/Outreach is the right answer. It seems that "free" is the biggest incentive for adoption at the moment, when the incentive should really be around the benefits of a community project (many eyes, etc).


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