"Highland Ham" wrote in message
...
An interesting thread.
While following it , my thoughts are with Richard Stallman and his Free
Software Foundation and subsequent development of the Linux Operating System
under the GPL = General Public Licence........and the many software
developers (world wide), who continue with providing Society with a ever
improving free Operating System with umpteen excellent free applications.

Linux and all the other GPL projects are a great service to the community at
large and have clearly provided products that otherwise either would have cost
much more or simply been out of reach of many people. That being said,
Stallman and his associates clearly have an agenda as well -- there's a _huge_
difference between true "public domain" software (such as what the government
produces and what the original versions of SPICE and NEC are) vs. GPL'd
software. This agenda had led to numerous "me too" licenses (e.g., the lesser
GPL license) where people tend to pick and choose which pieces of the GPL they
like and even occasionally tack on bits of their own agendas (e.g., they
restrict their software from usage by those in the military, the government,
even just anyone using it for fiduciary gain, etc.).

Not that there's anything inherently wrong with this -- commercial software
licenses are even more convoluted and variegated! -- but people should be
aware of the difference.

Ubdoubtedly a poor analogy: Just as when one chooses a religion, there's
usually a savior associated with it who performs miracles, promises peace on
Earth, etc... but you only get to receive all of those goodies if you buy into
the entire package, which sometimes contains all sorts of ideas you oppose!
Richard Stallman is then perhaps our modern-day software Jesus/Joeseph
Smith/Buddha/etc...

---Joel Kolstad
(who, on occasion, has used plenty of GPL software and thinks OpenOffice is
very good and would probably serve the purposes of 90+% of all MS Office users
just as well... oh... and GNURadio is pretty cool too...)