inevitable creeping permissiveness due to Open Source facilitation of Reimplementation

Posted Nov 17, 2017 8:57 UTC (Fri) by Wol (subscriber, #4433)
In reply to: inevitable creeping permissiveness due to Open Source facilitation of Reimplementation by frostsnow
Parent article: CUPS relicensed to Apache v2

> >Your position that only GPL is acceptable is what I would characterize as a nearly religious position on the issue of tool use.

> If you want to change my *personal* opinion, then convince me that another license is more valuable.

I'm sorry, but as a perfect example of religious fanaticism, that is a *perfect* example - "I don't care if I'm wrong, it's up to you to prove I'm wrong when I'm not even open to listening to argument".

I like to think I'm open to argument (I'm sure some people will say I'm not :-), but I try to list things as pros and cons. Why did I put this item under this column? *Why do other people put it under that column?*! If you're not open to that second question, then you just have to be a fanatic. And maybe, just maybe, when you do answer that second question, you'll start to question your answer to the first.

Other people can't change your opinion for you - you need to see their point of view, and then ask yourself whether yours is correct. (And yes, that is *HARD*. People don't like having their beliefs challenged. They would prefer to believe objective nonsense, than actually use logic to examine said nonsense.)

Cheers,
Wol

inevitable creeping permissiveness due to Open Source facilitation of Reimplementation

Posted Nov 17, 2017 23:29 UTC (Fri) by frostsnow (subscriber, #114957) [Link] (3 responses)

>I'm sorry, but as a perfect example of religious fanaticism, that is a *perfect* example - "I don't care if I'm wrong, it's up to you to prove I'm wrong when I'm not even open to listening to argument".

I appreciate that you feel I'm not being very open-minded here, but my purpose was to point out that a choice of license is a matter of perceived values and not merely an objective choice of tools. This is in relation to my initial concern, that values are shifting away from user freedom's as a core value and towards something else, which was implicit in my initial, snarky, three-word comment, and later clarified in a sub-comment.

I was not interested in elaborating on my personal values, because it was not relevant to the abstract discussion of whether or not a choice of license reflects perceived values or is an objective tool choice -- it was off-topic.

inevitable creeping permissiveness due to Open Source facilitation of Reimplementation

Posted Nov 18, 2017 0:01 UTC (Sat) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (2 responses)

> I was not interested in elaborating on my personal values, because it was not relevant to the abstract discussion of whether or not a choice of license reflects perceived values or is an objective tool choice -- it was off-topic.

That's fine. You probably know I'm somewhat ambivalent about a choice between copyleft and permissive.

And actually, for the project I want to write, I'm hard pressed to tell the difference between the two! In other words, if I licence my code GPL, and write it the way I intend to write it, the recipients will be able to treat it pretty much as if it's BSD!

But that's the nature of the beast ... :-)

Cheers,
Wol

inevitable creeping permissiveness due to Open Source facilitation of Reimplementation

Posted Nov 19, 2017 5:03 UTC (Sun) by frostsnow (subscriber, #114957) [Link] (1 responses)

>That's fine. You probably know I'm somewhat ambivalent about a choice between copyleft and permissive.

Nope, but I've been there myself in the past.

>And actually, for the project I want to write, I'm hard pressed to tell the difference between the two! In other words, if I licence my code GPL, and write it the way I intend to write it, the recipients will be able to treat it pretty much as if it's BSD!

Sounds like a service-based project, perhaps Affero :P?

inevitable creeping permissiveness due to Open Source facilitation of Reimplementation

Posted Nov 20, 2017 19:34 UTC (Mon) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

Actually, no.

The core of it is a compiler, p-code engine and key-value data store. The rest of it is largely scripts which are interpreted, and utilities which are mostly available in assorted free source form anyways.

Cheers,
Wol