Consistency

Tue, 10 Feb 2015

It's possible you're going to hear some anti-GPL stuff. I urge you to ignore it.

Whoever worked on the site in question did a poor job, in my opinion. (I'm not linking to it so as to avoid giving it more credit.)

Their arguments revolve around how "the GPL is not a free license" and "it restricts freedoms" and ends with a call for people to not only not use the GPL but to contact projects that are and and asking them to change to a pushover license.

If they're going to be against the GPL then, in order to be logically consistent, they must also be against proprietary software which by their own standards must be even worse than the GPL is. But they're not. That would at least make for a consistent position. But it's not.

In a world where the free software movement won, all software everywhere was free, and no one ever made proprietary software then in that hypothetical world maybe an argument could be made that copyleft isn't needed and could be safely retired. Until then, it remains a good strategy to ensure collaboration and protect software freedom.

It's possible you're going to hear some anti-GPL stuff. I urge you to ignore it.