[AusNOG] Fwd: [SAGE-AU] Richard Stallman Speaking at RMIT

[Andrew Fort]

On Sat, Aug 28, 2010 at 12:49 PM, Vitaly Osipov <vitaly.osipov at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Irrelevant or not, they are a significant part of the culture, at least for
> those of us who have been around since before Google and Facebook :)
>

Agreed, he certainly did a lot more than just author the editor half
the unix world uses.

> When you say his view are becoming irrelevant, do you mean the popular model
> of "free" services that we pay for with our private and behavioural data
> instead of money, often without realising it? Or what other reasons?
>
> V.

I do seriously think that's an important issue.  I recommend everyone
logs out of Yahoo before searching for "how to kill my wife" followed
by "steak and cheese", for example[1], but I think it's boring subject
matter because people only really care about that if they've lost
their inheritance to a nigerian scammer or would have been lured in by
Conroy's portal, and talking about it only encourages people to do
something less boring, like, post on Facebook.  Randall Munroe, on the
other hand, nails it:

http://xkcd.com/743/

Now, that doesn't take an hour to read. :)

I find that the software I write and release for free does not find
solace in the GPL, of any version.  Thus his views on software
licenses are less relevant to me - and I suspect some others.  That
was the basis for my recommendation to choose AusNOG over Richard
Stallman's speech.

I agree in the past, there was a battle.  But SourceForge, Github,
Bitbucket, are evidence that this "GPL struggle" is now irrelevant.
People write code and release it under BSD or Apache or whatever
licenses _all the time_.  Even for big projects and even for projects
not originated from within BigCos!.  Example: you can use my code
however you like with attribution alone; it's advantageous for me (I
might work for you one day, and people using it means some of them
will wish to help improve the code - that number doesn't get bigger or
smaller dependent on the license; my WAG is that it's about 1% in
either case).  Using the GPL buys you GPL-haters and little else,
other than a smug feeling of satisfaction that you're a demanding
so-and-so.

[1] http://plentyoffish.wordpress.com/2006/08/07/aol-search-data-shows-users-planning-to-commit-murder/

-a