On Tue, Jun 07, 2016 at 12:28:00PM +0200, Didier Kryn wrote:

[cut]

>

>     This puts them in a dangerous position of power. I'm not sure, after
> all, if they really intended to hijack Linux-Gnu. If they really want to do
> that, they might loose many contributions and find themselves alone, in the
> same situation as Apple and Microsoft. I'm not sure this is what they want.
> They may well have just made a mistake and still be unable to see it.

>

I believe that no corporation will be able to enforce its power on the
Free Software community, unless the community itself lends such power
to corporations. A very risky way of giving power to corporations is
by embracing the post-modern "trend" of using "more permissive
licences" than the GPL/LGPL for any kind of projects.

Now, let's make it clear once and for all that I don't have absolutely
anything against non-copyleft free software licenses (we all use tons
of non-copyleft sw every day, and that's great), but it is undeniable
that a software released under copyleft is much more resilient to the
influences of any external "power" than a software that can be freely
incorporated in proprietary products without any legal bound.


Despite being originally intended as a "guerrilla weapon" (and RMS and
the others were very careful at designing it), copyleft is indeed the
only way to keep free software free, forever. Corporations can come,
inject whatever they want, drive any project on whichever path suits
them, force any rubbish down whatever distro or environment they
like. But if the software they work on is *bound to remain free* by
law, the "power of the fork (tm)" will save it from being put in any
cage. They will have no alternative, but share what they have done,
and put their work under the scrutiny of the community.

Naturally, the situation today is much more complex than a simple
dialectic confrontation between copyleft and non-copyleft, but as a
community we should look back at the good ways we already have to
safeguard ourselves and our software. And copyleft is still today one
of the most powerful "weapons" we possess, despite they want to
convince everybody that it is more "convenient" to not use it for any
"serious" commercial product...

Several evil creatures are lurking out there, in the dark. Please do
not open the door at the first knock-knock, if you wish to avoid bad
surprises...

HND

KatolaZ

-- 
[ ~.,_  Enzo Nicosia aka KatolaZ - GLUGCT -- Freaknet Medialab  ]  
[     "+.  katolaz [at] freaknet.org --- katolaz [at] yahoo.it  ]
[       @)   http://kalos.mine.nu ---  Devuan GNU + Linux User  ]
[     @@)  http://maths.qmul.ac.uk/~vnicosia --  GPG: 0B5F062F  ] 
[ (@@@)  Twitter: @KatolaZ - skype: katolaz -- github: KatolaZ  ]