Re: AdaCore ... the Next SCO?

[M E Leypold <development-2006-8ecbb5cc8aREMOVETHIS@ANDTHATm-e-leypold.de>]

"Hyman Rosen" <hyman.rosen@gmail.com> writes:

> Preben Randhol wrote:
> > Just for the record I'm not against GPL per se, just that I don't like
> > posibility that one at some point end up in a quagmire where one cannot
> > make anything without a GPL license. That is not Freedom.
> 
> It is, for the users of the software. You are forgetting, as
> programmers so often do, that the freedom granted by the GPL is not for
> the benefit of programmers. If, in the process of granting users the
> freedom to run, read, modify, and share software it happens that
> programmers are inconvenienced, the FSF does not care. If users wind up
> with less software as a result, that is unfortunate, but not so
> unfortunate as to require overriding the principles of users' software
> freedom.
> 
> Remember that without the GPL, it's likely that some users down the
> road will be denied the ability to exercise the freedoms that ought to
> be theirs. AdaCore has done these users a favor by helping to limit how
> much non-free software can be produced.

Simply: No. 

Sorry, my friend. I've been pushing the GPL and more generally open
sourcing most of my professional live. But this kind of orwellian
newspeak simply annoys me and in my not very humble opinion doesn't do
good to GPL and Open Source.

There is a time to GPL, there is a time to do BSD licenses and LGPL
and GMGPL also have their place. Even the FSF had the wisdom not to
insist on GPL for everything. Your attempt to recast a _restriction_
as ultimate freedom undreminds me of Friedrich D�rrenmatt's novel "Vom
Beobachten des Beobachters" where the narrator characterizes rape as
the ultimate freedom since it frees the raped one from the necessity
of deciding.

"Freedom" is actually a complex thing, since, as other people already
have observed here, there are interactions and constraints between
different freedoms and not all can be realized at the same time. That
brings me to the suggestion, that for real freedom an ecology of
various coexisting licenses should be able to exist. Pushing the GPL
and GPL only as the singular way to salvation just is quasi religious
totalitarism: "If everybody would be to MY god, all evil would
perish". I personally doubt that.

As far as AdaCore is concerned, their pure-GPL stance has nothing to
with "freedom". It's a business decision as anybody can see, since,
perhaps, support without the additional "incentive" of a dual
licensing scheme (or say: The threat of GPL) doesn't sell any
more. You can draw your own conclusion from that.

Consider: Measuring AdaCores decision with your ethical scale would
make the current license arrangement totally fishy: For a substantial
sum of money one can buy onself off the downstream users freedom. If
the GPL is good, because it _forces_ the GPL developer to "respect"
the freedom of the downstream users, then not respecting it would be
"sin" but you can _buy_ yourself the freedom to commit this sin. 

How does that sound? The catholic church did this in the middle ages,
it was called "selling of indulgences" and led to the reformation.

Arguing purely on ethical issues is bound to fail with open source
licenses. One has to realize, that GPL and others are actually legal
hacks of a copyright system which had been invented to restrict
freedom. The hacks try to use the rules of this system in a way to
achieve another, novel effect, that is ensuring the one or the other
kind of freedom of the sources and/or the users.

Since the licenses are hacks, every single one has only a restricted
area of application and can also be misused (as an economical weapon).

If one is talking about license one better had to talk about cause and
effect -- that is, which license has which effects and wether one
would like to have that effects happen. Ethical considerations might
guide your reasoning, but frankly I cannot see a 1:1 mapping of any IP
ethics to a single license exactly because of their hackish
nature. 

Finally one has to consider wether (and how) your license works for
you or for the community: GPL protagonists are adviced to have a look
to the BSD communities. These also work and some bad things are not
happening generally, despite the licensees (users of source) are not
forced to do good all the time and ever. That makes me think, and it
should make you think also.

Back to the discussion here: It is rather simple: AdaCore has stripped
the linking exception from a number of source tarballs or pretend (so
far) that they are not valid any more. This is a license change from
GMGPL -> GPL. Other people have contributed under GMGPL and feel
cheated now. Generally the GPL cannot be changed (there is a guarantee
in the licensing clauses) and it open to discussion wether not the
same (including linking exception) applies to the GMGPL.

Just because the change was _to GPL_ (in your opinion the better
license) that doesn't dispense AdaCore from sticking to the rules. The
GMGPL is also protected by the rules. And that is the issue here.

Regards -- Markus