As much as I think RMS himself is an utter embarrassment of a human being, stories like this are why I also believe the GPL is one of the most important contributions to computing, ever.
MIT/BSD-style licenses are practically begging large billion-dollar corporations to rip off your work wholesale and use it to generate profits while contributing only the occasional patch or two. I used to see this phenomenon on HN, where every time some distro had a new release the BSD folks would be in here reminding us that BSD runs Netflix and routers and Playstations and won't we please just donate? As if Sony and Netflix value these projects enough to use them for critical infrastructure but not enough to keep them financially solvent.
(The GPL is of course not a panacea; as TFA demonstrates, Sun would have got away with this, possibly forever, had the author not made his serendipitous discovery)
In this specific case, the files were under the CDDL, which is copyleft. The only thing that Sun did that was not allowed by the license was to remove the copyright notice. Had the scripts been under GPL, nothing would have been different. Anyone can sell GPL software, as long as they allow access to the source code and allow further motification and redistribution.
I think the GPL and FSF etc lost momentum with their GPLv3 push. I know that was the case for me. I really liked GPL (v2). Then GPLv3 came out and I was like huh? After that I became much more open to the lighter versions of things MIT / BSD.
GPLv3 is not really workable in terms of preserving developer freedom to do what they want with code (as long as they share their code back).
Obviously the powers that be disagreed and the GPL has been "upgraded" to v3, but was never impressed, and now much happier to contribute to MIT / BSD licensed products (which do allow you as the developer to do what you want with the code).
I think the FSF appeared at a critical juncture and that the tools they built, that were totally free, helped to fix the direction that software was going. With the rise of Linux as the working GNU kernel an entire generation (or two) became aware and appreciative of open source which then went on to become the backbone of most of the internet and now those companies are some of (if not the) largest contributors to open source.
With that said you’re right, with GPLv3 they moved the fight into new domains that aren’t as obvious or really “as big of a deal” to a majority of people. Also with the rise of things like JavaScript GNU, under Stallman, became the old man crying at the children. Stallman hated the rise of “non-trivial” JavaScript and refuses to work with proprietary code so GNU could never have developed e.g. React or Tensorflow. We now have a new generation of open source tooling that was developed more in spite of the FSF than by it.
The current environment will in turn spark a new generation of tooling down the line that is even more removed from the likes of Stallman; who once responded to a request I sent to work on a JS library advertised on the GNU website with the fact that I should call it F/LOSS instead of open source (and nothing else.)
So while I respect the FSF for the work they did in creating what we have today, the time where they were leading the fight to save software is long passed. They won in some ways and the world is better for it, but they lost in others and I’m not sure the world is that worse because of it. Having trade secrets isn’t completely a bad thing as it allows competition and different implementations, though that part is simply my opinion I suppose.
I remember RMS saying that the license was based on these freedoms he enumerated, but after releasing software under GPL v2 he found out he had to explicitly add the freedom to actually RUN the software.
Remember that the idea of the GPL is the authors preserve and propagate the rights for the USERS.
He also once said "proprietary software subjugates people", which I thought was sort of over-the-top to say, but over time I think software in this era of dark patterns and privacy has unfortunately become very obvious.
The irony is the GPLv3 does more to address some of the problems we have with open source than most other licenses, but was rejected by many due to a lack of concern for these issues.
"The auto-update clause is optional" -> Yes, I confirm this is true.
The sample license header here [1] says:
> This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
That is only a suggested header.
From Linux kernel here [2], you can see:
> under the terms of the GNU General Public License version 2 only
Please try to refrain from personal attacks on people. It’s very disrespectful, especially when someone has clearly dedicated so much of their time to public works.
Where does this expectation come from that a rich organization or person using open source software should be paying for it? That’s against the entire spirit of the open source license in the first place.
From the same place taxes come, or more generally, quite a lot of social obligations. It's the expectation that, if you're benefiting from commons, you should also contribute something back to the commons.
A company using open source software to make money is making money off commons. Makes sense they should feel obliged to contribute something back, and since they have the surplus of the best form of contribution - money - it's reasonable to expect them to donate some of it.
Open source isn’t a commons. That’s your major mistake. Using it does not deprive others or wear down something.
> it's reasonable to expect them to donate some of it.
No, that’s actually quite ridiculous. “Reasonable” implies some level of reasoning behind it. There is no “reasonable” proposal of how much money should be given when it’s against the very spirit of the license to expect payment based on usage.
What is the percentage amount of profit an individual or corporation should contribute? Give me a concrete calculation of software usage and how much should go back to the project. Is it measured in percentage of clock cycles spent executing that code across all of an entity’s compute?
Presumably the IRS should also give a cut of all tax revenue collected by the US to the open source projects it uses too, right? If not, your beef seems to be purely with private enterprise being successful more than any fairness based billing.
MIT/BSD-style licenses are practically begging large billion-dollar corporations to rip off your work wholesale and use it to generate profits while contributing only the occasional patch or two. I used to see this phenomenon on HN, where every time some distro had a new release the BSD folks would be in here reminding us that BSD runs Netflix and routers and Playstations and won't we please just donate? As if Sony and Netflix value these projects enough to use them for critical infrastructure but not enough to keep them financially solvent.
(The GPL is of course not a panacea; as TFA demonstrates, Sun would have got away with this, possibly forever, had the author not made his serendipitous discovery)