Gregory's Server
We already have GCC basically obsoleted by LLVM (which, again, is great - but it's also permissive, it was made by corpos); GlibC still holds, but I doubt it's for too long, as Musl is coming along nicely, and the Linux kernel we pretty much lost to tivoization. What remains of the GNU project, then?
I mean, I'm in no position to tell the author what to do, he can do whatever the hell he wants to, but it's still sad to see that sweet free software protection for the base OS to slowly erode and fade to irrelevance like this.
Again: it doesn't make a difference to me, the user, if, say, the new Windows effectively becomes a *nix system and adopts those while staying just as proprietary. (it still would be better than what they have right now, by a mile, but merely technically)
And what I always liked about the Free Software movement, is that it turns the power dynamic of the copyright law on its head, therefore making an actual, tangible, political difference. Which is what I'm after.
There's an argument that permissive licenses offer more freedom.
And to that, I say - yes. If you subscribe to the naïve, individualistic definition of freedom, where everything is permitted, without restrictions.
And in the ideal world, maybe that's where the story ends. But we don't live in that world. No man is an island, and if you allow anyone to do anything unrestricted, that means you permit somebody to take someone's freedom away using force. And eventually you end up with a very unfree world.
How do you combat this? Well, with solidarity, of course. There needs to be a concerted effort to protect freedom from those who tend towards smashing it to pieces. That means, some boundaries must be set up. People who respect freedom must stand together and declare that freedom and non-freedom don't mix.
You know how the corpo kind tends to say that GPL "viral" and compares Free Software movement to Borg? Well, that shows what they fear the most. Copyleft represents this solidarity.
There's an argument that permissive licenses offer more freedom.
And to that, I say - yes. If you subscribe to the naïve, individualistic definition of freedom, where everything is permitted, without restrictions.
And in the ideal world, maybe that's where the story ends. But we don't live in that world. No man is an island, and if you allow anyone to do anything unrestricted, that means you permit somebody to take someone's freedom away using force. And eventually you end up with a very unfree world.