I think there are many ways to meet various design requirements of consumer electronics devices while still respecting the rights that I think the other of the device should be given.
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Daniel hits on a key aspect that always bothered me: who the real "users" are. The GPL doesn't affect me as an end user, but it does affect me significantly as a developer, especially if my intent is to potentially create proprietary software products.
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You are free to do so with software that is not licensed in a way to propagate and protect Software Freedom.
It simply is not a policy goal for the GPL to enable you to create software that does not offer Software Freedom to those you give copies...
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It can't protect software freedom when it restricts freedom to use the software for whatever you want. I don't see much difference from these new restrictive non-commercial licenses and other restrictions. It's a difference in values with same kind of approach to enforcing it.
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Many other people don't see the difference either. Tolerance for GPL leads to tolerance for these new restrictive licenses. The vast majority of people who are not familiar with any of this stuff aren't going to buy into the Free Software movement's claims that it's different.
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I find the take of the GPL as restrictive quite novel.
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You may not like it, but the GPL *is* a restrictive license, and no amount of justification that has been repeated ad nauseam over the years changes that. "it's easy to comply with" "it's for the greater good" "it's a compromise" "proprietary software is evil" and all that jazz
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I think the discontent with the (not quite positive) label of "restrictive" for the GPL family is that its restrictiveness is at a meta level: it restricts one's rights to further limit/withhold code distribution.
In contrast, "permissive" often allows those limitations.
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You're misrepresenting the goal of the GPL as the reality of the GPL. It's inaccurate spin. It heavily restricts usage far beyond what you're claiming. It's not true and it's unfortunate that Free Software folks push lies instead of acknowledging the drawbacks of the approach.
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GPL heavily restricts usage within entirely open source software. The restrictions result in license incompatibilities. Permissive licenses don't have those kinds of license incompatibilities since they don't restrict usage of the code. GPL restrictions very regularly hurt FOSS.
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You may think that the ends justify the means in this case but don't keep trying to pretend that it's not restricting usage including for open source software.
GPL is even incompatible with itself: GPLv2-only projects like Linux can't be mixed with GPLv3 along with other issues.
Projects with more permissive licenses also can't use code under more restrictive licenses without ending up with more restrictive licensing themselves. This completely applies within the set of GPL licenses. LGPL project can't use GPL code. GPL project can't use AGPL code, etc.
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GPL creates different bubbles of restricted code that cannot be used elsewhere including in projects using other variants of the GPL due to license incompatibilities or just being more restrictive. It's a restrictive licensing controlling usage. That's the very clear reality.
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