hypothetical(?) GPL problem

Karin Kosina kyrah at gnu.org
Thu Jun 28 10:37:08 UTC 2001


On Thu, Jun 28, 2001 at 01:06:54PM +0100 or thereabouts, Jeff Davies wrote:

> [..] There are examples of companies 
> publishing GPL code and succeeding., but the success or failure of these 
> companies is irrelevant. 

I disagree.
It is one of the goals of the Free Software Foundation to show that
companies can build a working business model based upon Free Software.
The success of companies who make money out of GPL'ed software is a
proof to other companies that it can be done.

> In other words, I think FSF europe should concentrate on protecting freedom, 
> talking about individual attacks by companies is pointless. 

I think that we have to point out such "individual attacks" to the
general public, and that this is indeed a *very* important point. Many
people go buy a Linux distribution without ever thinking about the
ideals and ideas of Free Software (which leads us to the Caldera
thread....) I do not consider the SuSE model to be any better than 
Caldera's just because they do not have this pay-per-workstation 
approach; but fortunately the Caldera issue is more likely to 
be publicly discussed (because of the inconveniences for all users, 
no matter if they are concerned about freedom or not.) It is 
now up to us to point out that what they did/do is not bad because of 
the monetary aspects but because of the *freedom* aspects.

Regards,                                     gpg - public key 0x1FE281EB
    Karin "kyrah" Kosina                                http://kyrah.net
                                                    http://the.system.at
+-----------------------------------><---------------------------------+
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