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Election 2006 (and beyond): Digital Copyright Canada
From: kebera_-at-_Cyblings.ON.CA
Date: 3 Feb 1999 20:41:43 -0500
Forwarded by request -keb ------- Forwarded Message Follows ------- Alan DeKok wrote: > Instead, he wants everyone to accede to his beliefs and political > persuasions, and he wants no one to benefit from his work unless you convert > to his religion. Here's what RMS said in response to someone who promoted BSD licenses. It seems quite practical rather than based on faith. The list is archived at http://www.public-domain.org/ . (Unfortunately they're redoing the site right now and some older stuff seems to be gone. I have the rest of the discussion as emails if anyone wants it.) -Krishna ---------------------------------------------------- Date sent: Sun, 29 Nov 1998 15:45:52 -0500 Send reply to: rms@gnu.org From: Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> To: Multiple recipients of list UPD-DISCUSS <upd-discuss@essential.org> Subject: Re: On the GPL You have written very eloquently to express the view that I described as "pacifist". Your ideal of conduct is to be compliant; never to say no to any way of using your code. The choice of a non-copyleft license that says yes to everything is a rational way of achieving that goal. However, it is a mistake to assume such code is "more free", because the typical user of such a program may have less freedom than the typical user of (say) GNU Emacs. Every user of Emacs has all the freedom guaranteed by the GNU GPL; but when a program has no copyleft, many, even most, of its users might have much less freedom than that. This actually happened with X Windows. Many of the users of X Windows have received proprietary versions with their operating systems. Although X Windows was free software as it came from MIT (later the X Consortium), without a copyleft there was nothing to ensure that this freedom reached the end user. I said "many of the users", but in the heyday of X Windows, nearly all of the users were without freedom. You appeal repeatedly to the principle that sharing should be voluntary; that no one should be forced to share a program. I agree with this principle, and that is why the GNU GPL never requires you to distribute a copy. To redistribute a GPL-covered program is never compulsory; if you do it, you do it voluntarily. The issue where we differ is the flip side: should not-sharing be voluntary too? Is it acceptable for someone to be compelled *not* to share a program? I believe that too is wrong; that every user should always have the freedom to redistribute a program, as well as the freedom not to redistribute it. Proprietary software is wrong because it denies users this choice. Copyleft is the way of guaranteeing that every user has both sides of this freedom--the freedom to redistribute, and the freedom not to. Non-copyleft licenses only protect the freedom not to redistribute, and make it all too easy for many people to end up without the other. I don't believe that the highest virtue is to be easy-going, and never say no to anyone. There are some things that it is a virtue to say no to. Copyleft says, "These freedoms are for everyone; if you want to take them away from someone else, the answer is no." Aside from that, it says yes. -- Krishna E. Bera, "Programmer on the loose" PGP key at http://www.achilles.net/%7ekebera/
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