OT: About the GPL

[cormullion]

Some of you may be interested in the http://www.red-sweater.com/blog/825/getting-pretty-lonely">current debate about the GPL, and how it restricts innovation or participation... I seem to remember some discussion about it in the past.

[unixtechie]

The really interesting topic today that is related to GPL is the inclusion of Mono into a Linux distribution (Ubuntu). Richard Stallman warned of  Greeks bearing gifts, and is being bashed by Microsofties and various accompanying softbrains



In fact all issues with GPL are political in nature.



1. Copyright and the terrorism of "intellectual property" originate from Corporations becoming transnational and pursuing deindustrialization of the US/metropoly while simultaneously outsourcing production to other places with cheap slave-like labour.

If classical capitalism kept production of say English textiles in England, murdering Indian weavers with their finished product exports, today even manufacture has been outsourced. This means the only way to claim their huge share of profits is for Corporations to assert they have nebulous "intellectual rights" to what has long been handed over to other peoples.

This may sound rather harsh, but other views of this issue (more common in mass media) contain a large dose of propaganda: take an example of music industry, which gobbles something like 80% of profits, but purports to speak in the name of "starving authors".



2. GPL is first and foremost a political tool - work of a genius - which allowed something unprecedented, a construction of a non-parasitic, non-capitalist model of creation and production, on the lines of the ancient "community"  or 'tribal" efforts, the model of  mutually helping and mutually benefiting individuals. If I save tens of thousands with, say, GCC toolchain plus OS and utilities, I will  give back something of my efforts.



3. The danger of GPL is well-recognized by the parasites, the Corporations. The essence of corporate world order, so to say, is to create economic parasitism and deflection of profits from the natural, technological flow of activities. Therefore some time ago an "Open Source" movement  spurted from unknown sources to add non-GPL licenses which would neutralize exactly the hated "viral" nature of GPL. Many do not recognize to this day that the idea behind that was to kill GPL, not to expand the falsely named "Open Source" movement.



4. Slightly later this effort at interception and corporatization of GPL continued with corporations jumping on the bandwagon and creating 'Linux Foundations", or purchasing some brands and whole distros (e.g. Suse by the hated Novell, which immediately began to cooperate with Microsoft)



Ubuntu  belongs to this trend. It was set up as a parasitic add-on to create a MS-like GUI environment on top of the real workhorse distribution, the community-created Debian. It was set up by a shady character, some Mark Sh., an Israeli who suspiciously got so rich in South Africa that he could treat himself to flying as a space tourist.

Then suddenly he turned to parasiting on Debian, and very,very quickly Ubuntu (with the insanely infantile "Hardy Herons" and "Dapper Drakes")  became virtually the main  distro for the Mass Media and the lemmings. Who paid for the ads campaign? Why?

I have no idea what real agenda is pursued by people like that - money or something like putting backdoors into precompiled kernels or simply subverting Linux - I do not know. But this is not good, real, honest work in my eyes.



5. Now Ubuntu szar, this very Mark Shattleworth, if I got the story correctly, blessed Mono for bundling with their Linux distro,  and for the sake of truly unnecessary "personal productivity" i.e. trifle applications. And the lemmings squeak indignantly when RMS warns of the possible trojaning of Linux with MS technologies, as there is a danger of MS later claiming some patent rights or imposing restrictions or incompatibilities.



6. Another huge topic is the subversion of personal computing and taking away ownership of data from an individual user. A whole strategy exists there, and MS is pushing it with all its might. Again, the Open world stands in natural opposition that stems from its technological nature, again RMS warned of "surreptitious uses of computers", and again he is not heard.



7. So basically the question of GPL comes to the two fundamental views of life and work: that of robbing or swindling  of everyone by everyone, which is known under the euphemism of "market" today (for the extremists which came after WWII everything is a market, and the generations of westerners got their brainwashing from early childhood) -- or cooperative work of members of community.

The genius of GPL creators was that they managed to engender the second from within the first, and protect their work from greed and dishonesty by wisely turning the legal mechanisms of the parasites against parasites themselves. And this sparkle of humanity is what must be cherished in the increasingly oppressive world of corporate jack-booting and blackmail.



These are the issues at stake with GPL.

[anta40]

This simple, radical restriction means that you are prohibited from taking a GPL project and incorporating it with a closed-source project.

Even if the closed-source project is a private/internal project, which is not intended to be used publicly?



Well, I might be wrong...