FSF to launch code hosting

Posted Feb 26, 2020 1:05 UTC (Wed) by NYKevin (subscriber, #129325)
In reply to: FSF to launch code hosting by rgmoore
Parent article: FSF to launch code hosting

> The decision to use a FOSS license for your software is inherently ideological.

I disagree. I imagine that most people who pick (for example) the Expat license or the {2,3}-clause BSD licenses don't care about ideology and just want to make their code widely available (this is also the attitude that spawned various "crayon" licenses like the WTFPL). Linus is on the record about Linux's use of GPLv2 being non-ideological (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PaKIZ7gJlRU for Linus's take on GPLv3 - TL;DW "I just wanted to get patches back from downstreams, why are you dragging me into this Tivoization thing?").

There are many people for whom free software is inherently ideological, and there is certainly some correlation between ideology and choice of license. But I don't think free software ideology is inherent to the entire set of FOSS licenses - that's too wide a generalization.

FSF to launch code hosting

Posted Feb 26, 2020 2:02 UTC (Wed) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

The choice of a FLOSS licence can easily be pragmatic too ... for some companies software is a cost, not an income generator. Choosing a FLOSS licence can lower that cost, by encouraging others to do some of your work for you ...

And using a Free licence stops your competitors from using your code against you :-)

Cheers,
Wol

FSF to launch code hosting

Posted Feb 26, 2020 2:07 UTC (Wed) by donbarry (guest, #10485) [Link] (1 responses)

It isn't, but you're effectively saying that's a good thing.

And it's not.

Those who punt ideology off the playing field for "practicality" are only accidental and momentary friends of free software, and their friendship cannot be trusted to survive changes in the markets or their own interests.

Just in the last month, I found myself thrown off the "Home Assistant" official forum -- *a Facebook group!* -- because I criticized the abuse of someone who filed a bug that their "official Android client" was built with the assumption of Google Play Services, and while it did not yet rely on them, the project manager stated that this project intends to use them and will not support a version which does not. And this is a project which sings how central privacy is to their mission on all their web pages!

And what about Wire, which strung along the community for four years promising how important the future availability of an F-Droid non-Google dependent Android client was, until three months ago when suddenly it wasn't.

Or Mozilla singing how important respect for the community is, and then adding telemetry that doesn't respect the "do not telemeter us" flag -- to find how many people had disabled telemetry?!

Yes, ideology is important. I am glad the FSF still has some fight in it, even if their refusal to defend the unprincipled and scurrilous attacks on Stallman have significantly reduced their credibility in this regards.

FSF to launch code hosting

Posted Feb 26, 2020 6:25 UTC (Wed) by NYKevin (subscriber, #129325) [Link]

> It isn't, but you're effectively saying that's a good thing.

I tried very hard to keep my comment as value-neutral as possible. Any judgment that you saw in it was not intended to be there.