This comment breaks the HN guideline that says Please avoid introducing classic flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say about them. It has triggered a devolutionary cascade that so far has made it as low as "Wow, what an asshole" and "man who thinks sex with children should be legalized". Blasting craters in the threads like that damages this site. I'm sure you didn't mean to, but please don't do it again.
I used to think the same as you, but I came around.
I am annoyed by the FSF dogma because they lay an exclusive claim on the word ethics when applied to software. I consider myself an ethical person even in software. But my definition of ethical is less strict than the RMS definition.
>they lay an exclusive claim on the word ethics when applied to software.
I'm not sure that's a fair characterization. They've defined an ethical framework for software and then they discuss things being ethical or not within that framework.
Anyone is free to use a different ethical framework and decide if an action is ethical or not within that framework instead.
Personally, I'm annoyed by RMS because it's annoying when someone I disagree with on so many things turns out to be right so often. I think they call that "cognitive dissonance."
He's consistent to a point. He's quite silent about the hardware aspect, even though free software licensed CPU designs have been available for a long while.
If you have the design, and you have access to FPGAs, I'd say that's got you pretty close already.
Edit: We were talking about CPUs, not complete systems. And yes, the performance would be poor, but RMS has already strongly established that in his book performance is a distant runner-up to free.
Assuming you have an open FPGA toolchain (which AFAIK exists for like a year or so), open FPGA designs supported by that toolchain (AFAIK doesn't exist yet). Even if you don't insist of the FPGAs design being open (which is a rather arbitrary border then), you'll have a hard time getting something with performance people actually want to use in the supported chips. It's a nice dream, but not practical right now.
By pretty close you mean no where near a usable system then you'd be correct. If you're not a hardware person, as I'm not, I don't think I could go from blank fpga and parts to a working laptop with a keyboard, trackpoint, and lcd screen in any reasonable amount of time, nor with any certainty that it would work and not be error-prone.
On the other hand, it's very difficult to build a design for an FPGA using only free software. (Until very recently, it was outright impossible; now, it's merely very difficult, and requires that you use certain very specific FPGAs.)
>By pretty close you mean no where near a usable system then you'd be correct. If you're not a hardware person, as I'm not, I don't think I could go from blank fpga and parts to a working laptop with a keyboard, trackpoint, and lcd screen in any reasonable amount of time, nor with any certainty that it would work and not be error-prone.
The exact same argument can be made about the operating system.
If you're lucky it's off-chip and your soldering iron and a very sharp knife will come in handy.
The problem with 'patching' hardware these days (oh, I'm that old) is that most of the time you'll find your problem is located inside a chip, and it isn't the traces are in planes that you can't access (if you're lucky they might run in a spot where you can dremel through and then cut and solder two small wires to the buried trace). Via's don't help either (especially not in layers that start and end under BGAs).
Patching hardware was never easy, but with todays degree of integration of components and SOCs it is harder than ever and frequently downright impossible.
Lots of things have gotten easier since the hole-through era, but hardware fixes aren't one of those.
That depends. Microcode tends to be used in CPUs rather than regular ASICs and not all CPUs have re-writable microcode (though quite a few of them do). So unless you're talking about a CPU the answer is probably 'no'.
You probably have a bigger chance that there is an FPGA on board that you can re-load.
I've "patched" my CPU (using a pencil to close some leads on an old AMD cpu to enable overclocking) and I've "patched" a motherboard (replacing a blown capacitor). But that was analogous to patching bugs in your closed source software with a hex editor.
Eh, IDK about that. It's pretty well-understood how to make a simple but usable OS kernel. I think most competent programmers would be able to do it (or at least know where to start) given enough free time.
>RMS has already strongly established that in his book performance is a distant runner-up to free.
To him, maybe. Not all of us have the luxury of getting paid to be a techno-luddite, using antiquated workflows and having the spare time available to re/write drivers when necessary.
If I made the same performance/freedom trade-offs I'd be completely unable to do my job.
The fact that you consider performance and freedom to be a trade off means that you've already given up even the slightest hope of freedom. You as a developer and a user should want the freedoms afforded to you by the GPL or any copyleft license for that matter. In the ideal world your high performance software would be released under the GPL you would have the best of both worlds. The war won't be won by rewriting every single tool and releasing it under the GPL, it will be won by pressuring existing companies to license their software under the GPL.
The people who want non-copyleft licenses to succeed are those who which to make a profit from the control and ignorance they can impose on their users by closing their source and platform or those who are willing to trade their user's freedoms to appease them.
Businesses have a huge amount of leverage on the OSS software ecosystem and so it's really no surprise that the licensing choices are to benefit the businesses funding the development rather than the users. It's to be expected but no less sad. There's a small group of passionate people who have basically dedicated their lives to making the world a better place by writing software that's truly free and respects its users, they built an entire community and movement around the idea, and actually stand by their beliefs -- yet people dismiss them because the company worth hundreds of billions of dollars has a better UX.
>The fact that you consider performance and freedom to be a trade off means that you've already given up even the slightest hope of freedom.
True, mostly thanks to shitty companies like Apple, Microsoft, Autodesk, etc.
>You as a developer and a user should want the freedoms afforded to you by the GPL or any copyleft license for that matter.
I do.
>In the ideal world your high performance software would be released under the GPL you would have the best of both worlds.
We don't live in an ideal world and never will.
>The war won't be won by rewriting every single tool and releasing it under the GPL, it will be won by pressuring existing companies to license their software under the GPL.
This doesn't work, especially in software for engineering where there are often sole, hegemonic powers and established monopolies and where the cost to enter the market as a new competitor is non-trivial. We're not talking a desktop manager or a text editor here, we're talking millions of dollars of R&D for things like CFD suites. Open alternatives exist (like, say, OpenFOAM) but they often lack accreditation/certification/rigorous testing and when you're dealing with people's lives the choice is often proscribed entirely.
>The people who want non-copyleft licenses to succeed are those who which to make a profit from the control and ignorance they can impose on their users by closing their source and platform or those who are willing to trade their user's freedoms to appease them.
There's a financial incentive to creating walled gardens and proprietary software that you can charge for.
>yet people dismiss them because the company worth hundreds of billions of dollars has a better UX.
When the choice is between "being able to function at my job, at all" and "use free software", well, the choice is clear.
I wonder what kind of world we would have if GNU were completely defeated, if no one released anything under the GPL anymore. Sure, free software would still exist, but nobody would call it "free software" and no one would prevent anyone else from creating non-free derivatives. Nearly all software would be "open core", with some free software here and there but with many or most of the interesting components non-free.
We're already very close to that world. Many people seem happy to see GNU losing ground every day. For myself, I am not sure that we are working towards the best possible future, but I'm not even sure what that future should be.
We used to call that "public domain software" and it was big in the 80s from what I recall (I was a kid then). You'd release something to the public domain and people can do with it whatever they wished. Then GNU came around and ate everyone's lunch, for better or worse. I suspect for better.
Maybe GNU is just a stop-gap movement to get everyone on board the FOSS train, who knows. BSD licensing hasn't caused any apocalypse yet and arguably it provided a networking stack for Windows that was superior to anything MS could rush out the door back in the NT 3.5 days. There's something nice about being able to put the code into commercial products without worrying about strict GNU/GPL-like conditions.
It was Microsoft that came and ate public domain software's lunch, not GNU. GNU and the GPL were not needed until aggressive copyright enforcers such as Microsoft came on the scene. Bill Gates wrote a famous rant calling anyone that shares code a thief, essentially. The GPL was a reaction to that attitude and has saved the culture of sharing code.
If most people defaulted to sharing code like was done pre-Microsoft then BSD would be fine. Read RMS's rant that is linked above. He's still at defending against "adversaries" of Freedom. This is war!
OK, so even MS is now open sourcing (some of) their code. Maybe it's not "war" anymore, but you need to understand the history a little.
> Bill Gates wrote a famous rant calling anyone that shares code a thief, essentially. The GPL was a reaction to that attitude and has saved the culture of sharing code.
Didn't Gates' letter come out ten or more years before the first version of the GPL.
Going back even further, we used to just call it "software". The idea that software could be copyrighted didn't even happen until the 1970s, and it took a while for the idea to really take hold.
This is why rms is the way he is. He's old. He remembers the days when all software was free. He's been trying to get that back ever since.
RMS is an idealist. If people actually made what he proposed (envisioned), world would be much better place.
It is hard to see the entire impact of Free software and even harder to predict how the world would like if people actually stood up to it but I can say that I am sure we would have:
- more secure Internet
- more decentralized/distributed Internet
- no ISP blocks
- much harder if not even impossible NSA spying
- no disgusting DRM
- no patents and patent trolls -> more inovation
- no force updates, no abandoned users
- more competition in hardware and software field
- things being developed for people and not sheer profit
- ...
- add your points
You listed a bunch of things without substantiating. For example, how would free software prevent the NSA from spying? Internet backbone taps don't care if your HTTP implementation is running under Windows or Linux...
> how would free software prevent the NSA from spying?
A lot of hard problems come from the fact that you need lots of developer attention to build and maintain solutions that just work. The domain is tricky and complex enough to where, you can make it zero-effort for one configuration, but making it zero-effort for all possible or even all likely configurations takes more resources than is available.
The example relevant here is cryptography software. It's not hard to encrypt stuff. It's hard to make end-to-end solutions that just work, for all possible uses and across all possible platforms.
Free software has a restrictive effect of only making software platforms that are open and extensible, vastly reducing the effort needed to maintain end-to-end, user-friendly encryption.
It would make it pretty much impossible for the NSA to spy on citizens if we only had free software platforms to support.
Not all answer need to be pure technical ones - they don't go and search person by person via manpower but they use meta data and algorithms. Simple overflowing their meta data would force them to use other means. Also you forget social impact - if majority of people actually listened to RMS that means majority of people would be very privacy and security minded and would press the government to change the laws (NSA spying is illegal anyway but with majority of folks actually actively pursuing this would made their existence hard or at least not possible to just go and spy and ruing privacy of entire planet).
RMS believes that end user of software / hardware should be in complete control, it was/is never about developers.
BSD/MIT/etc lic may provide for more developer freedom, but often they are used to restrict user freedom as the code is folded/packaged into commercial projects with non-free licenses
It's a somewhat artificial distinction, since the user of a piece of software becomes a developer to modify it.
And to preclude modifications which prevent him from effectively monetizing his labour is to infringe on his freedom.
Prehaps it would not be if money (etc.) didnt exist. It's always the way, however, with idealists to prescribe policies that make people free in their utopia but cause chaos in our reality.
> And to preclude modifications which prevent him from effectively monetizing his labour is to infringe on his freedom.
This sounds a lot like the people saying that adblocker software is infringing the freedom of people trying to monetize their websites (or maybe even "stealing" from them). And I think the same response applies: the fact that your business model isn't compatible with adblocker software, or with my choice of software license, isn't my problem.
Plus it seems extra presumptuous to claim some kind of inherent right to profit off derivative works of my software. You can only distribute derivative works of it at all because I've granted you a license. A royalty-free one at that! With the only condition being the copyleft condition: that you keep any derived works as open as the original. If you don't like that condition, we can negotiate a commercial license on whatever terms you want, with appropriate payment. Or you can write your own software...
> Plus it seems extra presumptuous to claim some kind of inherent right to profit off derivative works of my software. You can only distribute derivative works of it at all because I've granted you a license.
Sure, but one's choice of the GPL has signalled that one wishes that others be permitted the freedom to build upon the work and do as they wish [0] with their additions -as well as the original work- just so long as they -upon request- distribute the original and their additions to folks who have received the binaries.
[0] This includes charging for access to compiled versions of the software, access to support and documentation, etc. etc. etc. [1]
It's just an observation about which licence maximises the freedom of the user.
Since we're in a capitalist system, monetization of one's labour is hugely important from real-term freedom. To deny people that is to make them less free.
So the most permissive licence is the one providing the most freedom.
> Plus it seems extra presumptuous to claim some kind of inherent right to profit off derivative works of my software.
Who's claiming that? On the other hand, I've met more than a few pro-FSF people who seem to think it's cromulent to claim that I don't have the right to profit off my work (which is insane; you can pick whatever license you'd like, copyleft or not, and so can I).
You aren't profiting off your work, you're piggybacking off their work with just enough tweaks to sell it. Go write your own software if you want to profit off your work. Then you won't have to deal with the copyleft licenses because you won't be using anyone else's work.
I think you should re-read my post. I don't have a problem with other people choosing to use the GPL, and dealing with its terms or choosing not to use it. I have a problem with the temerity of people like the FSF insisting I use copyleft or I'm somehow immoral.
I think you have likely confused what the pro-FSF people say...
Likely they said it is unethical for you to distribute software with out access to the code. Which you interpreted to be against profiting since you likely believe that open source == no profit.
I'm well aware of how to make money with open-source software. I do it. I am working to no longer do it, because wage slavery (be it W-2 or under the guise of "consulting") sucks.
Turns out that you need capital to do that, and the FSF's insistence that digital bits as capital is immoral is silly.
That has nothing to do with what I've said, and I don't think you understand what capital is. The GPL is fundamentally incompatible with the notion of software as a capital asset; when its value as a salable object is effectively zero due to the ease of marginal duplication, one's business model becomes a labor-oriented one, i.e. consulting. Which means burning one's time, which is what one acquires capital assets to avoid doing.
But, clearly, I'm so misinformed. I obviously haven't thought this through. I didn't read everything Stallman wrote a decade ago. And I certainly haven't read the GPL (both v2 and v3) line-by-line to understand its ramifications.
It's a pity you felt like you needed to be an asshole about this.
> ...I don't think you understand what capital is.
I -uh- do.
> The GPL is fundamentally incompatible with the notion of software as a capital asset; when its value as a salable object is effectively zero due to the ease of marginal duplication...
Two things
1) That applies to all software. All software -regardless of license- has an effectively-zero duplication cost.
2) You can still sell software distributed under the terms of the GPLv2. You can charge any price you like.
Calling me names doesn't change the falsity of your statement, which was:
> [T]he FSF... [insists] that [treating] digital bits as capital is immoral[.]
This isn't their position. It never was.
You seem to think that the only way a thing can be considered capital is if one retains the exclusive rights to control the distribution of the thing. This is an over-narrow definition of capital. :)
> 1) That applies to all software. All software -regardless of license- has an effectively-zero duplication cost.
That's not true. Copyright allows the copyright holder to enforce a cost of copying in their license fee. You can illegally copy software at zero cost, but that's not the same thing. I can illegally ignore the GPL, too, but I won't.
> 2) You can still sell software distributed under the terms of the GPLv2. You can charge any price you like.
You're being disingenuous. The purchaser can and will inevitably redistribute the software free, plunging its effective value to zero and turning the only tenable long-term monetization strategy into a labor business. Even Red Hat is a labor business in all but name, they live off support contracts and custom development, and I would be incredibly surprised if you could find a business of nontrivial size--say, $2m/year in revenue--whose products are non-SaaS (i.e., not violating the spirit of the GPL while complying with the letter) and GPL-based for which this is not true.
I mean, this is not some shocking revelation I'm saying here--there's a reason the GPL and especially the AGPL are so popular as the crappy side of dual-license schemes, because it allows a company to hamstring those who would derive from their software while not crippling themselves.
FSF at least supports the concept of government granted monoplies over ideas, I do not. I would love to see the end of copyright, and patents as a concept.
I firmly believe a world with less windows and more linux would be a wonderful place...
What I take from it is that he wants to provide freedom in general, not of any particular person.
If I have the freedom to take someone elses freedom away, then that is more freedom until I actually take someones freedom away.
To use an extreme example, if we had the freedom to own slaves you could argue that there where more freedoms available to us. But if you actually want to protect freedom you don't allow people to own slaves.
Nothing in GPL prevents monetization, this is one of the major myths. I assume your one of those people that believes it is impossible to make money off "free" code
Further it is not about developer not making money off his/her code, but not exploiting the work of others with and denying follow on developers the work of others.
Especially after clang showed the world how useful error messages look like.
And GCC has some serious limits when it comes to help other tools, because RMS (probably rightfully) fears that if GCC outputs to detailed backend information, people would start adding non-GPL software after it and build non-GPL compilers on top of GCC.
Which lead to the funny situation of people asking to include LLVM-based tools into Emacs, because LLVM allows to build code-analysis tools GCC just doesn't provide the info for.
IMHO clang's success and maybe even existence is clear result of GCCs restrictions, but removing these restrictions would undermine central principles.
And both compilers are better now than they would be if the other didn't exist, so good for everyone I guess? It doesn't seem possible to reach all goals with just one of them.
That's not really true. Perhaps they can't make changes themselves, but they can ask others to do so, or hire someone.
Mozilla Science, for example, tries to pair up researchers who have ideas together with developers who can code to build open-source projects. Despite the fact that the researchers may not be able to code, the fact that they have the right to share and modify the code is important.
That is not true at all, I know many non-developers that will compile source code themselves, one that is done often would be FFMPEG where you have several compile flags that will make the software preform differently based on the options you select, This is an example of Source Code being useful to non-developers.
Compiling source code you don't comprehend and aren't capable of rewriting isn't really an exercise of freedom. You could just as well distribute a closed binary with runtime configuration options, for all it matters in that case.
if you're implying that everyone who usefully modifies source code or compiles with options is able to write the code from scratch, i would advise you rethink your position.
to put a finer point on it, the concept of "layers of abstraction" is fundamental to computers and software. i can know quite a bit about adjusting the pieces of a program without having the ability to build it as effectively as i modify it.
Not from scratch, perhaps, but it still takes technical acumen to do anything useful with the source code at all, which implies that a non-technical user can't really exercise the freedoms of free software, beyond simply having access to the source code.
> RMS wants user freedom, not developer freedom That is the point people always miss.
Or we reject his attempt to lay exclusive claim to a word as all-encompassing as "freedom" and to co-opt it to his personal pet ends. You know, either/or.
Yeah, whether I agree with it or not, I'm not suggesting he doesn't have a reasonable point to make. I'm just saying he's an asshole, and to some extent, that is working against his own goals.
RMS is a politician, dude; calm down. Let's look at the preceding sentences:
> The Clang and LLVM developers reach different conclusions from ours
because they do not share our values and goals. They object to the
measures we have taken to defend freedom because they see the
inconvenience of them and do not recognize (or don't care about) the
need for them. I would guess they describe their work as "open
source" and do not talk about freedom.
That's much more nuanced than "anything that isn't GNU isn't free". He thinks that their license is a lot different, because he has a particular definition of "free" that he's championed for decades. Putting "and this is what I mean by 'free'" into every statement would be more PR-friendly, but redundant for... anyone who's heard RMS speak or breathe for 30 years.
If anything, this is a reasonable statement from a politician: "The Clang and LLVM developers reach different conclusions from ours because they do not share our values and goals." Maybe save the "what an asshole" comment for if he ever says, "LLVM hates freedom, GNU rules, BSD drools."
While I see where you're coming from, and I don't agree with the way you've framed this. That idiosyncratic and generally unshared definition of "freedom" does, to me, make him (and his devotees) at least a little shitty when they attempt to claim moral superiority based on it.
I feel the same way about other religionists who assert judgment based on their own pet beliefs, it's not an FSF-specific thing.
It can be effective, but you need a much, much stronger kind of charisma and a better grasp of rhetoric than Stallman or your typical FSF zealot. When delivered by somebody who gets spittle-flecked about this stuff, it makes you crazy and a jerk, instead of just a jerk.
No words like "free" or "freedom" appear anywhere on the http://llvm.org/ homepage. The license merely says "free of charge" without any kind of rationale. Certainly there's no GNU-style manifesto explaining their carefully-considered views on the rights a software user ought to have.
Think what you like about whether they should talk about freedom, but we can easily confirm that they don't.
Similarly, no words like "freedom" appear on the home pages of many popular GPL-licensed projects. That doesn't mean that, "Mono doesn't talk about freedom". It doesn't mean that, "Python doesn't talk about freedom".
It means they didn't use the word, "freedom" on their home page. OpenBSD people care about and talk about freedom, I assure you. They have a track record of ejecting software with insufficiently free licenses from inclusion their project.
FreeBSD has switched to Clang because, among other reasons, they consider it freer. You and RMS may not agree that that it is indeed freer, but it is obnoxious and demonstrably untrue to say they, "don't talk about freedom".
Python is not licensed under the GPL, and it is not clear to me that they care about this sort of thing.
As for Mono, I was there at the conception of the project, and can thereby tell you off the top of my head that if you go to the History section of the documentation they have an archived copy of the premise, and it is dropping with "free as in freedom" language.
> The Clang and LLVM developers reach different conclusions from ours because they do not share our values and goals. They object to the measures we have taken to defend freedom because they see the inconvenience of them and do not recognize (or don't care about) the need for them. I would guess they describe their work as "open source" and do not talk about freedom.
If you're objecting to that, well, where do they talk about freedom? I'm saying rms appears to be correct because I can't find anything they have to say about the issue. I searched more than the homepage.
I get that you don't like what rms observed about the Clang and LLVM developers, but you haven't cited anything from them that would show him to be mistaken.
RMS uses "freedom" to mean "the best thing you can have", kind of like, but also kind of opposite to, the way people use "freedom" to describe America. It's just propaganda, who cares. Many people view permissive licenses as more free, whatever, it's a buzzword.
RMS' use of "free" is very well defined in terms of software (see: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html). You are arguing his definition of free, but that isn't up for debate here. RMS may be pedantic, but I'd disagree that makes him an asshole.
IMHO claiming that a multi-faceted word like "freedom" is "trade-marked" to only mean one specific kind of freedom is a sure way to provoke misunderstandings and conflicts. Especially since it is generally seen as a good thing, so claiming other people don't respect it (because they mean something different when they use it) is going to piss them off.
See: every discussion of GPL and "freedom" in a public forum ever. One might think everybody is sick of these arguments already, especially since they are so predictable, but apparently it always stings some people enough.
RMS saying that other developers have a different concept of software freedom is reasonable. RMS saying that the difference is important, and his idea of software freedom is reasonable and worth debating. Saying that other developers, "don't talk about freedom" because they use a different license is first class assholitry.
It's more reasonable that your stance here. You can quibble about how to define freedom, but given that RMS includes freedom from future vendor lock-in, it's entirely reasonable for him to say that other developers don't talk about freedom (as he means it) - because they don't. It's not hypothetical - BSD-derived code has been used in closed-source operating systems (both windows and notably macos) and lots of other software.
By using BSD over GPL you're choosing to make it easy for many people to use your code, even if that use eventually may support closed-source lock-in. Since most developers dabble in open source mostly as a prestige project, that's a reasonable choice - you're not doing it to prevent software monopolies or lock in, are you? So no, you don't care about freedom, exactly as RMS says. Most people are probably doing it for recognition by their peers and because they're interested in solving the problem at hand, and compromising on those two points for a slim chance that you might contribute to a more pervasively free software future sounds like a risky bet.
None of the two minor projects I wrote and support use (L)GPL.
> it's entirely reasonable for him to say that other developers don't talk about freedom (as he means it) - because they don't.
This is complete nonsense. Clang is replacing GCC in many BSD-licensed projects exactly because they feel it is more free than GCC. You don't have to agree that they are right, but saying they aren't talking about it is obnoxious and false.
No it's just his same argument as ever. The GPL specifically addresses RMS' issues of software freedom. Choosing a different license ignores the topic of software freedom as defined by the FSF. That's all he is saying.
Look the GPL is a hard choice. It is very unfriendly to a developer who is looking to make a living on their code, since it makes selling that code as an artifact. It's not impossible but much more complex than if you just have a EULA.
That said if you remove that difficulty you neuter the GPL and weaken the point of software freedom.
I get why RMS pisses people off. He doesn't keep arguing for using the GPL to be an asshole, but because he thinks software users are more important than software developers. Perhaps most developers feel differently?
> Look the GPL is a hard choice. It is very unfriendly to a developer who is looking to make a living on their code, since it makes selling that code as an artifact.
It seems like you accidentally a word somewhere in here, but know that you can charge ANY price you want for compiled software distributed under the terms of the GPL. Your only requirement is to -upon request from one to whom you have distributed your software- provide the source code for your software to that person.
Fulfilling the request with patches against other code is acceptable. Requiring a snail-mailed request is acceptable. Charging your actual direct costs for fulfilling the request is acceptable.
Selling GPL'd software isn't more complicated than selling non-GPL'd software.
Yeah. iPhone on a train is not an ideal way to have an Internet argument.
My point was it complicates the business model of selling software artifacts since the GPL does not prevent downstream dissemination of the source so long as the GPL is not violated. So the fairly common business of selling a binary blob of functionality that ceases to legally be useful after the license expires falls down with GPL licensed software.
I suppose one might argue the GPL holds hostage a commercial software ecosystem that favors software sellers over software buyers. But well that's really the point.
And I think that's what angers people. It's certainly the impetus behind Open Source.
> And I think that [a commercial software ecosystem that favors software sellers over software buyers is] what angers people. It's certainly the impetus behind Open Source.
If I've correctly characterized your statement, I can't agree with it.
RMS was originally motivated by his sudden inability to get access to the code for the driver for their computer lab's fancy laser printer to fix an embarrassingly bad bug that was wasting a bunch of other people's time. Many people prefer open source software because the guaranteed availability of source code helps to keep software that BigCos would no longer maintain (for whatever reason) alive, or dramatically improve software that companies can't be arsed to get right. [0]
> So the fairly common business of selling a binary blob of functionality that ceases to legally be useful after the license expires falls down with GPL licensed software.
Eh? AFAICT, the model still stands.
If you've written everything in house, dual-license it. If you've not, and if you're writing software for BigCos, [1] put a clause in your support contract that stipulates that for the next X years, $CLIENT will upgrade to $LATEST_VERSION after $REASONABLE_TIME_PERIOD and will not use older versions, or else suffer termination of the support contract and monetary penalties.
I mean, lots of people pay for (and keep upgrading) RHEL rather than use Centos or Scientific Linux.
[0] Ferinstance, DD-WRT and OpenWRT have been really, really good for the state of home WiFi router security.
[1] Which -frankly- is the only place I would expect to find such a license.
What does DRM support in a compiler tool chain even mean? The ability to develop DRM is available by the nature of the tool, but that is also true of GCC.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but isn't that what the Apple App Store has been doing since it was introduced? As I recall, Xcode used GCC back then, so how is Clang relevant?
https://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2014-01/msg00247.html