IOW you support free software only when you can use it to build proprietary
software?
Yeah... there's plenty of businesses and NPO's founded exactly on that idea.
That's why we have no shortage whatsoever of "revolutionary" new web
frameworks and javascript libraries. There are plenty of people who like
building "open source" components for other developers to build off of, and
there's really nothing wrong with that. I say there is nothing wrong with
that because, being non-copyleft, these components are available for both
free and proprietary software, so free software developers get a direct
benefit from their existence.
This view that free software should exist only as compilers and frameworks,
however, I don't quite agree with. Open source people make a distinction
between differentiating and non-differentiating components, which Bruce
Perens (one of the original open source guys and a former Debian leader)
explores in http://perens.com/works/articles/Economic.html.
Non-copyleft free software licenses directly encourage this kind of
development. The end result is that we get real solid runtimes, frameworks,
libraries, and whatnot, but the best things written on top of them
(differentiating software, i.e. the stuff that actually matters to users) are
proprietary. This seems to be the reason you generally favor non-copyleft
licenses, is that right? To say you support the free software movement
(which, again, isn't strictly about building software, but about encouraging
a computing paradigm where a user has full access and control of all of the
code running on their computer... since you're running Trisquel, you are
indeed one of these users, and hence a direct beneficiary of this movement)
100% and then go on to say that you support it "only when used as a tool" (I
presume a tool for building proprietary software, given your dislike of
copyleft)... isn't that a little contradictory here?
It's refreshing that Stallman and the rest of us here stick with the original
"free software movement" that started in 1984... the vision where it's about
what the user can do and share with fellow users, not specifically about
empowering proprietary software developers... this again is one of the
reasons Stallman is so adamant about terminology, because conflating his
movement with "open source" means putting him in the same basket as you and
Bruce Perens, and labeling the operating system as "GNU/Linux" diminishes his
agenda and distorts his involvement in the history of the OS (which you
probably have no problem with, of course)
