On Sunday, 31 August 2014 at 04:25:11 UTC, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
And I *do* appreciate that GPL, unlike BSD, can *realistically* be cross-licensed with a commercial license in a meaningful way and used on paid commercial software (at least, I *think* so, based on what little anyone actually *can* comprehend of the incomprehensible GPL).
What? Did you mean to write "BSD, unlike GPL?" Explain what you mean.
As for Stallman, his problem is that his "all software must be free" crusade happens to have a few real benefits from some source being open, but will never happen to his idealistic extreme of all source becoming free because closed source has real benefits too.
That's why when linux finally got deployed to the majority of computing devices over the last 5 years- though still not on the desktop ;) - it wasn't a full GPL stack but a permissively-licensed Apache stack (bionic, dalvik, ART, etc) on top of the GPL'd linux kernel combined with significant closed binary blobs and patches. That mixed model is dominant these days, whether with iOS/OS X and their mix of open source (mach, darwin, llvm, webkit, etc) and closed or Android with its greater mix of open source. As such, his GPL, which doesn't allow such pragmatic mixing of open and closed source, is an antiquity and fast disappearing.
