It's free just as a trojan horse is free.
The big idea is to have uneducated commercial vendors use GPL code, then they get found out, and "Oh boy do I have some great news for you, welcome to the wonderful world of open-source, which now includes your commercial product. gg no re"
I'm not making this up, it's explicitly stated in the LGPL documentation.
>>10
The big idea of GPL:
Call your software "free" so stupid commercial developers will re-use your code in closed-source products. Then Richard's lawyers give you a nice call, "GPL your product or hand over the cash".
Then you badmouth people using the MIT/BSD licenses for being "less free" as they are not viral (which means that you can include BSD-licensed code in a commercial product).
RMS loves to play with words to deceive. For example he tells you to modify the meaning of the acronyms used by your opponents (without specifying that you changed the meaning). http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.html
Most nerds may be sympathetic to many of his goals, but his frequent dick moves such as this example means that he is a major douche.
tl;dr: let's all start calling GPL the "GNAA Prohibitive License".
Of course not. I've distributed mit-licensed code and sent simple patches to a few projects using a variety of licenses, and I don't care to have some assholes like RMS or ESR pretend that I'm part of their movement and support their agendas just because I happen to have distributed source code for free.
I may agree with them on many issues, but people who use the GPL without specifying a version rarely realize that their project are pawns at the mercy of the evolving agenda of the FSF.
Many just want to get the code out of there, freak out at the permissiveness of the BDS-style license, and resort to the only other license they know, without taking the time to learn about the issues.
> Ok, so give me a specific example of an acronym that was changed that was intended to deceive.
Rms asks you to always define DRM as something like "Digital Restrictions Malware" because he think the original meaning is "propaganda". He did the same thing for TCPA.
And in the same page, rms recommends that you call copyright infringement "sharing information with your neighbor". lol double standards.
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.html
Also, just see how you redefine freedom to suit your own needs.
> everybody is allowed to use Free Software as part of a commercial product
And you conveniently forget to mention that linking to a GPL'd library means that you must open-source the whole thing. http://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-not-lgpl.html
> I don't understand the meaning of dick move. I don't understand the meaning of major douche.
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=dick+move
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=douche
Enjoy
> How does applying the GPL to a program without a specifying a version become “pawns at the mercy of the evolving agenda of the FSF”?
This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
> exactly the same in spirit
So what? There's zero guarantee. A huge time-bomb that is unlikely to explode because it didn't for 20 years? How fucking great.
RMS dropped quite a few time the expression "Digital restrictions management" in articles aimed at non-technical people without letting them know that he changed the meaning of the acronym DRM that they are likely to have heard without knowing its meaning. It's outright deception.
His being an asshole is hurting the cause for more sensible and well-spoken advocates.
>>27
Changing the meaning of an acronym that your readers do not know, without telling them, is intellectually dishonest and deceptive. The context is completely irrelevant.