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Authored by: Anonymous on Tuesday, June 05 2012 @ 02:14 PM EDT |
Copyleft:
Pragmatic Idealism by Richard Stallman
If you want to accomplish
something in the world, idealism is not enough — you need to choose a method
that works to achieve the goal. In other words, you need to be “pragmatic.” Is
the GPL pragmatic? Let's look at its results.
Consider GNU C++. Why do
we have a free C++ compiler? Only because the GNU GPL said it had to be free.
GNU C++ was developed by an industry consortium, MCC, starting from the GNU C
compiler. MCC normally makes its work as proprietary as can be. But they made
the C++ front end free software, because the GNU GPL said that was the only way
they could release it. The C++ front end included many new files, but since they
were meant to be linked with GCC, the GPL did apply to them. The benefit to our
community is evident.
Consider GNU Objective C. NeXT initially wanted
to make this front end proprietary; they proposed to release it as .o files, and
let users link them with the rest of GCC, thinking this might be a way around
the GPL's requirements. But our lawyer said that this would not evade the
requirements, that it was not allowed. And so they made the Objective C front
end free software.
Those examples happened years ago, but the GNU GPL
continues to bring us more free software. [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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