@bkuhn "GPL developers are the same as proprietary licensors who won't sell a new license for an amount you can afford" is a good way of putting it. But many proprietary licensors will sell a license for an affordable amount. Those are more useful than GPL, which is useless, therefore GPL worse than proprietary. "No copyleft allowed through our doors" is a policy that requires education and enforcement, thus costs something, thus explains "it's worse". Your analysis these are sophistry and that people are terrified of people driven by principle rather than money is rather self-flattering, and ought lead to questioning the analysis. IME people are rarely terrified by people driven by principle rather than money. Rather, people who trumpet living by principle (and note others don't see it as a vs money thing; they agree principles are important, but perhaps not the exact one that is being trumpeted, and see themselves as pluralistic and nuanced) are seen as some combination of annoying, cloying, irrelevant, and irrational. This is not specific to free software at all. Perhaps I can see this because I have a tiny bit of sympathy for the view, at least the part that is skeptical of principles, which I see as too often a retreat to commitment and away from substantive critique and growth.
Hrm, you are perhaps right, although if you are, the main reason I'm so widly hated by the software industry is merely because I'm annoying, not because I stand on principle of software freedom.
That conclusion leads me to a lot of cognative dissonance, and thus it's a difficult concept for me to accept. If I'm merely an annoyance to the world, what's the point in doing any of this?
My trite response is that software freedom is somewhere between "ignore" and "laugh" in Gandhi's stages of nonviolent activism. Feeling hated/attacked by the software industry underestimates just how poorly software freedom, as an ethical concern, is doing. Software freedom is unknown to almost all in the software industry (fortunately its realization is not quite so stunted), nevermind among all software users. That's worth working on correcting.
Mike Linksvayer at 2013-12-02T20:33:35Z
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