From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00 autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 1025b4,1d8ab55e71d08f3d X-Google-Attributes: gid1025b4,public X-Google-Thread: 103376,1efdd369be089610 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public From: dewar@merv.cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar) Subject: Re: GLADE and GPL (was: what DOES the GPL really say?) Date: 1997/06/27 Message-ID: X-Deja-AN: 253057613 References: <33B2B5C8.41A0@does.not.exist.com> <5ousck$6rj@kiwi.ics.uci.edu> <5p0eum$1293$1@prime.imagin.net> Organization: New York University Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada,gnu.misc.discuss Date: 1997-06-27T00:00:00+00:00 List-Id: Dave says <> This is complete nonsense, and frankly I am a little surprised at the level of misunderstanding (I would have thought Dave understood the philosophy behind the GPL better). The business about the GPL assuming all users are sinners is fanciful stuff, but bears no relation to reality. The real point is a purely pragmatic one. Most people think of public domain software as being software that anyone can do anything with. Yes, indeed they can, they can make a minor modification, or even just reformat the code, and then copyright the result and make it proprietary. Why does this bother us? Because of some philosophical concern about what is right and wrong in the software world? Because we want to be sure to get proper credit for our work? Becuase we do not want people to unfairly profit from what we do? NONE OF THE ABOVE! The concern is purely pragmatic. We are writing software that we want to be available to the general comunity and *stay available to the general community*. It is the stay available that is the concern. Suppose the government had not insisted on GNAT being under the GPL, and instead the NYU team placed it under the less restrictive, supposedly freer ACL. Now, when the contract ended, sure enough the version of GNAT available at that time (1.something???) would be available to everyone. But Ada Core Technologies could have then taken that version, and developed it as a purely proprietary product and charged whatever they liked for it. The big value of a product like GNAT is precisely that it remains open to general use. Commercialization of this kind would have complete undermined one of the important purposes of GNAT, which was to provide a high quality Ada 95 compiler, available to the general academic community with sources, and which would continue to be available. Sure, in theory, someone else could take the 1.xx versoin and develop it independently, but that is an unlikely scenario. We have over and over again seen freely available academic products turn into proprietary products that are no longer freely available. We thought it was important to ensure that this could not happen with GNAT, and so did the government, which is why it insisted on the use of the GPL. Going back to the Booch components, Dave is of course free to choose any approach he likes for his work, but in practice the only difference between the ACL and the use of a broadened GPL such as is used by GNAT is that it makes it possible for someone to produce a proprietary version of these components based on Dave's work. I personally think that having a freely available version of the Ada 95 form of the components is a tremendous advantage to tthe Ada community. If some company takes this and commecializes it so that a few years from now you have a situation where the only really usable version is a proprietary version that you have to pay for and cannot get full source access, then we have lost something valuable. That's why I think it is unfortunate to use the ACL instead of the modified GPL for such projects, it seems freer, but can very easily lead to much less freedom. Note another scenario which is even worse. Suppose the GNU components which along with Linus' kernel make up the GNU-based Linux system had been written under something analogous to the ACL. Today we have three companies competing in the support of Linux, but all the changes an improvements they make are available to one another and to the entire Linux community. If the GPL had not been used, we might see three divergent versions of Linux, all proprietary, with competing features. The tremendous value of Linux and the original GNU vision would be essentially lost, and we would have just a few more incomaptible miscellaneous Unix versions around. THe whole point of the GPL is entirely pragmatic. The idea is to make as much software as possible as freely available as possible, because this free availability benefits users. I gave a talk at the Ada Europe Conference on why free software was of tremendous importance in building reliable systems. The key point here is that you cannot afford to build reliable systems on top of black box layers of operating systems, real time kernels, and Ada runtime systems for which you have no access to the sources, or only limited access to the sources. For high reliability code, you need total control. Note that if it were really true that the only point behind the GPL were the kind of philosophical issues that Dave refers to, then obviousoly there would be no such thing as the modified GPL or the LGPL. The idea of allowing this modification is precisely to make it possible to create proprietary tools using GNU compilers. Now, why would the FSF encourage that? Simple, the argument is pragmatic. if we encourage everyone to use free software compilers and systems, then more resources will be available to improve and support these compilers and systems, and these improvements benefit all users. Yes, obviously from the user community point of view, it would be desirable if the software being produced were freely available rather than proprietary, but it is important to understand that the issue here is a pragmatic one, not purely a philosphical one. The idea of free software is to promote an environment in which the computing community can get its job done more effectively. The tremendous success of Linux shows that this idea can be a powerful one. More and more people are switching to using Linux, not because they want to join some polictical movement, but because it is the best technical tool for the job! Robert dewar Ada Core Technologies