Background reading:

• Copyleft: Pragmatic Idealism
• Why you shouldn't use the Lesser GPL for your next library

BSD, LGPL, and GPL are all free software licences. The user gets the same four freedoms in each case (use, study, modify, redistribute). But, using the BSD licence (or the LGPL) takes away an incentive to contribute to the free software project.

GCC's technical advances create a big incentive for developers who are interested in compilers, and for companies with a commercial interest in a good compiler existing for their platform, to contribut to GCC - helping free software whether that's their priority or not. With a BSD-licence project, developers can choose to ignore GCC and fork LLVM instead, so neither GCC nor LLVM benefits.

LLVM weakens GCC's ability to attract free software contributors. That's why Apple funds LLVM.

It's not difficult to see which approach works best: Which OS has more contributors, *BSD or GNU/Linux?

> more freedom to the person who uses and implements the software

Users have the same freedoms with GPL and BSD.

The BSD licence provides building blocks for non-free projects that compete against free software. The GPL provides building blocks only for free software projects.

GCC's technical value encourages developers with technical goals to contribute to the free software GCC project, regardless of whether helping free software is their priority or not. LLVM weakens this by providing an alternative project where people can work on technical progress without the need to contribute to the free software LLVM project.

So LLVM makes people less likely to help advance the state of free software.

(LLVM attracts some investment, such as that of Apple, up to a certain point, because Apple's goal is to undermine GCC.)

So it's not about user freedom. There's no difference there. It's about what's the smartest way to help our friends and each other, without helping the companies that are competing against us and trying to replace free software with their proprietary software.

> And how exactly are you envisioning to create
> "open standards" over secret DRM schemes (such as Cinavia)?

I don't think we disagree, but do you think the issue will be as clear for politicians?

They'll want DRM, they'll see HTML5 has support for DRM systems, they'll ask for a HTML5-compatible DRM system, and free software won't be able to offer one (one that really works).

Or some kind of limit on down-modding comments by the same person. It's annoying when you post three comments with little relation to each other, then suddenly all three get voted down and you *know* it's because you insulted someone's fandom object in one comment.

I don't think there's any equivalent abuse with up-votes for this particular type of case.

There's only one month left, don't procrastinate too long.

> I wonder how younger generations do appreciate Emacs

Someone said that to me in 2002. I was a new Emacs user then, and I'm still using it now.

Debian's package install stats suggest the Emacs user base is steadily growing:

http://qa.debian.org/popcon-graph.php?packages=emacsen-common

And the developer mailing list is very active and high-quality:

https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/

However, Hip-Hop's future is looking less certain:

http://www.theonion.com/video/there-are-people-in-world-who-are-concerned-about,32163/

yeh, coz I have that much time for educating you.

Thanks for the link. I've noted it in the wiki that FSF hosts:

http://libreplanet.org/wiki/When_should_firmware_be_free#Hard_drive_controllers

I don't know if anyone from FSF reads that page, but I'll gather info and I'll raise it with someone in FSF next time I'm talking to them.

(Of course, this isn't the case with the drive of the laptop that FSF has endorsed.)

It's not new. I've been reading about it for 15 years.

Thanks for putting an accurate title on your comment.

> Oh, so if one isn't a programmer they shouldn't criticize

That's what *you* said. I'm just turning it around so you can see how silly it is. And you find it silly indeed.

I had pointed out all the non-programmer work done by FSF and you replied that the real people we should thank for GNOME are coder Miguel de Icaza and dotcom startup Eazel.

You said RMS could only take credit for the tools he wrote, but that's nonsense. He's been doing non-programmer work full-time for about twenty years now. Including launching four desktop projects and doing everything he can to make them a success. And with GNOME he did.

GNOME Foundation came years after GNOME. GNU started GNOME.

GNU has more than a hundred successful software projects. Some are cornerstones of the operating system, and you're moaning because there are some GNU projects which haven't been successful. And how are your microkernel and your Flash replacement coming along? Written any good compilers or standard c libraries recently?

GNOME was launched by FSF and RMS spent years promoting it and getting people to work on it. He still does.

You seem to be trying to make GNU disappear by arguing that nothing matters but lines of code, and only the lines written by RMS's hands count as GNU.

The toolkit is a GNU project, born from another GNU project.

Miguel de Icaza was one developer and software architect. He did years of good work and then gave up and took money to promote Microsoft software (via Novell).

> And none of those things were done by the FSF itself.

We have a GUI desktop because FSF launched four projects to make one.

The first became GNUstep (a success, but not enoughso), the second didn't produce a desktop but did produce Guile.

Then KDE was launched, with the then-proprietary QT toolkit. The problem was so urgent that FSF launched two projects to fix it, GNOME and Harmony. Harmony was a project to replace the QT toolkit, but it wasn't a success.

GNOME was a success. So much of a success that it was, IMO, what lead to QT being freed. So we've FSF to thank for directly making GNOME, and indirectly for licence changes in QT.

(And then there's the fact that FSF made the developer tools and licences which helped a lot of other projects come into being.)

But as usual, people try to avoid crediting FSF, so a lot of people don't know this.