eltoyoboyo's Journal: Dr. James Gosling on GPL

As for Richard Stallman's "Free but shackled: The Java trap," it's hard to know where to begin. He has his own rather peculiar definition of "free" that I think violates the First Law of Thermodynamics (energy is conserved): Developers put a huge amount of energy into creating software, and if they can't get that energy back in a way that balances, then the system falls apart. I've been in this discussion countless times, and I'd like to avoid landing there again. GPL software is not "free": it comes with a license that has a strong political agenda. Like GPL software, the Java platform is "free" in many senses: You don't have to pay anything for the runtime or developer's kit, and you can get the sources for everything. Unlike GPLd software, the Java sources don't come with a viral infection clause that requires you to apply the GPL to your own code. But the sources for the JDK do come with a license that has a different catch: redistribution requires compatibility testing.

Dr. James Gosling is a Sun Microsystems fellow who managed the group that created Java in the early 1990s