The point you fail to understand is that with software that respects a user's freedom, one doesn't need to wait for someone else to fix the bug for them and then hope that bug actually gets fixed when the ostensible fix is released. Users running nothing but free software have options to fix any bug and verify that fix which proprietary software disallows.

The rest of your statement is a form of false dichotomy—arguing from perfection. I never said anything was perfect.

The software Apple distributes to users is proprietary, even if part of that software is built from free software. Proprietary software is never safe for users. Its safety is for the proprietor—what the program allows the proprietor to do to the users.

Apparently memories around here are so short people can't remember when researchers showed Apple can read iMessages anytime Apple wants and the users have no idea which messages are being read. Whether anyone at Apple reads someone's iMessages is a detail so long as Apple can read any iMessage they choose. The same applies to any proprietor for any software which doesn't respect your software freedom. You avoid these problems by avoiding proprietary software.

Nothing in the GPL prohibits commercial redistribution. The GPL aims to prohibit proprietarization. Commercial redistribution and proprietarization are not the same thing. Ensuring software freedom for users of derivatives is a good thing.

Any device's software can do things you don't want. If that device requires software which runs on your computer, then that software can do anything your OS lets it do.

This means a program running with your credentials (running as you) on a networked home computer can upload copies of files you can read, launch a program to spy on you as you work, or possibly install some software that does nasty things to any user of that computer. The possibilities are too numerous to list. And this program can be something that computer users might view as necessary or innocent like a device driver program, or some other program needed to let users control the added device.

So what users who value their privacy and software freedom want has little to do with 3D printing per se because these users make the same demand regardless of the purpose of the new device. One such user avoids devices that run non-free software, or require non-free software to be installed elsewhere to work. That way one can run a 100% free software system (right now that means a free BIOS, free software OS, and nothing but free software programs installed atop that) and use the new device fully.

Actually, as Snowden's revelations point out to all of us, embedding computers with non-free software in them is a huge social problem as it takes away our privacy. Many computers which are updateable only by proprietors is a social problem as well, because those computers can be set up to do things their owners don't want them to do. There's no opportunity for the owner to know what they're really doing, so even hiring someone to do that work on their behalf is out of the question. Many people buy and operate these devices but that is no excuse for treating the customers that way. Citing how many other people build such systems is also no excuse for treating other people that way.

If "Apple respected the wishes of these copyright holders" they would not have distributed any software without complying with each program's license in the first place. That onus of responsibility lies with each distributor.

When a free software program's copyright holder stands up for their license and demands compliance, they're up against another party who is doing the wrong thing. Hence it's perfectly right and proper to say Apple got caught.

Similarly, it's up to Apple to investigate the information they're given before distributing the work further in order to make sure Apple is not participating in copyright infringement. Giving Apple a pass for being handed works by "criminals in China who took the works of authors" is no excuse for commercial copyright infringement. On the contrary, if the upstream were known criminals it should not have been that tough for an multinational organization to learn who they were dealing with and become suspicious thus triggering an investigation.

It's telling that you didn't come up with some attempt to diminish NeXT's wrongdoing in their initial GCC distribution. I'll take Kuhn's word for it over yours because he's only one hop away from the people at the FSF who were there at the time and know what happened in dealing with NeXT.

Recommending any proprietary software to do any task is recommending a security hole. It's trivially easy for any proprietor to include code that spies on you, as computer programmers have long known and Edward Snowden has shown us again. No amount of experience running proprietary software will tell you what you need to know to fix its problems, share your fixes with others, hire others you have good reason to trust to fix problems on your behalf, or even allow someone you have good reason to trust to inspect the program to see if anything needs to be fixed (they're forbidden to do this work for the same reason you are). Picking one proprietary anti-virus program over another, picking one proprietary browser over another, or picking any proprietary program over another proprietary variant of the same kind of program is merely choosing your master. You cannot arrive at a trustworthy solution in this way.

Instead you should choose free (libre) software for your OS, your firmware (via Coreboot), and for all the software you run atop that system. Eschew services that require you to adopt non-free software and gain more control over your computer. The Free Software Foundation's Respects Your Freedom recently added a computer that meets these criteria. We should help them and help free software hackers write more free software to do the jobs we need to be done.

"Good art" strikes me both a non-sequitur here and remarkably subjective. I certainly would never disqualify folk art from being "good" because folk art is highly derivative of others work.

Copying things exactly in this context is a side-effect of using a medium (computer graphics) in which visual items can be duplicated precisely. If one is uncomfortable with that fact, one should consider choosing another medium. This also doesn't help identify the meaning of what I asked about earlier. I also fail to see what would be objectionable about OpenTTD's precise replication and capability extension.

Artists should support free speech even when its their speech that is being commented upon.

I don't know what Sawyer makes of OpenTTD and I see no pointer to a source for the parent's recollection. As I understand it, OpenTTD is currently licensed under the GNU General Public License version 2. I'll also take OpenTTD's developers word for it that their work is a newly-written program (the fruit of a 2003 reverse engineering effort by Ludvig Strigeus, according to Wikipedia), not an illicit derivative of code from Sawyer.

Given those assumptions, OpenTTD is not a version of the program Sawyer wrote. OpenTTD is a separate program that does the same job with no shared code between them. Sawyer's TTD can be said to inspire OpenTTD but I don't see how inspiration qualifies as a derivative work. Creating a work-alike in no way alters the other program(s) that do the same thing. So it's not clear to me what an "artistic view" of the original program really means. I hope this language is not an attempt at giving or claiming unwarranted control over workalike programs.

I certainly hope the parent's recollection is inaccurate and more artists welcome comments on their work, as well as respecting the user's freedom to run, inspect, share, and modify the program.

Thanks for pointing me to your sources so I can read them for myself.

Fighting for copyleft is standing up for user's software freedoms for derivative works. Copyleft itself is not the goal, but copyleft is part of a means to securing software freedom for the future.

I see RMS saying he's fighting for user's software freedom via copyleft, but I don't see how that is equivalent to saying "RMS does not want GCC to play any part in a toolchain/process which might have non-GPL parts". Other copyleft licenses exist. RMS and points out when those licenses don't do as good a job defending user's software freedoms as the GPL does and then he explains his rationale. Also, it is possible to make a copylefted free software license that allows conversion to the GPL (such as the Netscape Javascript license or via an explicit conversion clause). I can also envision a strongly copylefted free software license that does a better job of defending user's software freedoms than any of the GPL variants. But I don't know of such a license. If one such license should exist, I'd expect RMS to respond as he did to the existence of a compiler that was technically superior to GCC which also defended user's software freedom, "For GCC to be replaced by another technically superior compiler that defended freedom equally well would cause me some personal regret, but I would rejoice for the community's advance.".

It makes sense to me that if the GPLv3 or a variant (such as the AGPLv3) is currently the best license for defending user's software freedoms and one of one's goals is ensuring software freedom, one would steer users toward the latest version of the GPL licenses. This isn't steering people to the GPL for no reason at all, or some kind of brand loyalty; the reasoning is carefully explained.

Except for all the companies that do develop and distribute GPL'd software, notably Cygnus (one firm that charged large sums of money for GCC enhancements) and now Red Hat which bought Cygnus. And there's no evidence Apple "accidentally infringe[d]" when they chose to stop distributing GNU Go rather than include complete corresponding source code after being caught infringing the GPL. There's no evidence accidental infringement was at work when Apple "prefer[ed] to impose Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) and proprietary legal terms on all programs in the App Store" (as the FSF put it) when Apple was caught violating the GPL in their distribution of VLC. There's no evidence NeXT accidentally forgot to comply with the GPL back when they commercially distributed their illicit GCC variant to NeXT users. In fact, as Brad Kuhn points out, the FSF has long worked with those not in compliance to silently get them into compliance. We only hear about the cases where the company is obstinately refusing to comply for long periods of time before GPL enforcers at the FSF or Harald Welte (who holds copyright on some code in the Linux kernel) publish details of the ongoing GPL non-compliance. The FSF has a history of seeking compliance rather than punishment. Your characterization of "getting smacked" for accidental infringement is not at all supported by available facts from the aforementioned parties. Regardless of license, how any copyright holder behaves in the face of copyright infringement is up to them, not the GPL.

But the real tip off in your response harkens back to the main misunderstanding of this issue—different values lead to different conclusions. It's important to explicitly draw out those values and conclusions so one isn't led into a trap. The older free software movement doesn't share the same values as the younger open source movement. Caving into business desires for control over the user via proprietary derivatives of free software is okay with the younger open source movement and objectionable to the older free software movement.

The GNU GPL isn't honestly described as an "open source" license because that framing misconstrues what the GPL says and why the GPL exists. The GPL was written by Richard Stallman whose main work since his time at the MIT AI lab has been the pursuit of software freedom for all computer users. Stallman is clear to explain this history and correct people on this issue at virtually every talk I've heard him give, so it's not hard to find a recording of a talk where someone, such as you, tries to position his work in terms of a movement that doesn't agree with his values. The open source movement was founded to "sell" free software to businesses by being silent about the main issue the free software movement stands for—a user's freedom to run, inspect, share, and modify all published computer software. This leads to very different outcomes when faced with reliable, powerful proprietary software. The open source movement does not care for a serious discussion of ensuring user equality of access. So when you frame the FSF and the GPL in terms of "open source" and a priority to get companies to use GPL'd software (thus objecting when companies like Apple can't proprietarize GPL'd software), you fundamentally misunderstand what the free software movement is about and why the GNU Project exists.

The free software movement is not about a popularity contest. A wider audience which comes at the expense of software freedom for all is unwelcome (very much in line with the ethic of "a freedom is a privilege unless enjoyed by one and all"); those acts are called out and carefully explained so others become wise to their tactics. There are businesses that develop and (even commercially) distribute free software, so the free software movement isn't anti-business. The free software movement is an ethics-based social movement against controlling computer users, subjugating users to one another's control. This is precisely what proprietary software does and what free software does not do.

The sexism is uncalled for and appalling.

LLVM users currently have software freedom and (as far as I know) LLVM contributors are contributing free software. This is the established default. But, thanks to the license choice, if anyone makes a proprietary variant of LLVM users of that fork will no longer have the freedom to inspect, edit, or share that software. Thinking of a proprietary fork of a free program as a whole new program requires us to ignore how that program came to be and I'm unwilling to do that. This would also seem to be bad news even for users such as yourself who are apparently more concerned with advertised "features" than with software freedom as code changes could include unadvertised spying one would be legally prevented from inspecting or removing.

Apple's management (notably Steve Jobs) and some people who work for Apple used to work at NeXT. When NeXT needed a compiler, they chose to base their work on GCC. NeXT got caught distributing the GCC Objective-C frontend in violation of the GPL in what Brad Kuhn (longtime FSF employee and GPL violations enforcer) called a "calculated" infringement. It's reasonable to consider that when Jobs and company lost that fight they decided to get away from GPL'd software because they had experience with a copyright holder who defended their license. Sadly, Apple is building quite a record of copyright infringement. Apple got caught distributing VLC and GNU Go in violation of the GPL. Apple also got caught commercially infringing upon some writers' copyright. So perhaps Apple's switch from GCC toward a non-copylefted free compiler has at least as much to do with control over the user as any technical issues. After Apple's other illegal and unethical behavior, maybe Apple is just getting tired of the bad press.

But it's clear that differing values are at the heart of this issue; not having Apple use GCC doesn't "harm GCC" at all. The fight for software freedom was and is the reason for the GNU Project including starting GCC. Apple is welcome to help improve and distribute free software, including allowing its users to share in that freedom. This isn't a popularity contest no matter how much Eric Raymond and other open source advocates want to frame the issue in that way. As RMS said, "If that enables GCC to "win", the victory would be hollow, because it would not be a victory for what really matters: users' freedom."

So nobody pitied your choice to agree to prevent users from controlling their computers ("I once worked on a project where part of the technology stack came with a legal requirement to take steps to prevent customers from reverse-engineering"). And nobody pitied you complaining that you couldn't find developers who were willing to be taken advantage of themselves—giving you code in exchange for nothing ("so LGPL was just as radioactive as GPL"). Or perhaps it was your namecalling (code licensed to not let you hurt others is "radioactive") that helped drive them away.

You'd be better served by using the words "software freedom" as those words are entirely appropriate to describe a user's freedom to run, inspect, share, and modify computer software thus giving them control over their computer. It's perfectly natural for one to ask "which freedoms are you referring to?" and for you to explain. This is an opportunity for discussion and understanding, in other words learning. When someone misuses language you benefit their efforts by abdicating a proper use of language, tacitly accepting their distortion. There is a difference between power and freedom and in the context of slavery, what slavers want is the power to abuse another human being. Society needs more people to point out misuses of language and not give up in the face of those that disagree.