🚀 go-pugleaf

Here is an attempt to interject some thought into this debate.

What the FSF sees as the ideal system for the production of software
is a world without software copyright and restrictive licenses.  The
recent post here about using a tipping model as a means of funding
information development is one such world; there are others as well.

Unfortunately, we do not live in such a world.  There seem to be
several approaches to how to write software which behaves as if it
were in such a world.  

One approach is to place the software in the public domain.  This
suffers from the resulting ability of people to capitalize on the
effort of the developers by making comparatively minor changes and
reselling the program, under a copyright with a restrictive license.
Another flaw with this approach is that it is exceedingly difficult to
guarantee that credit goes to the authors for the original work and
that credit goes to the resellers for the bugs they introduce.  It is
also difficult to establish lack of warranty protection.

Another approach is to use a copyright similar to that used by
Berkeley, the CMU Mach project, the X consortium, etc.  This makes
sure that the credit gets placed properly, and makes it much easier to
establish lack of warranty protection.  The problem is that someone
(say, DEC) can take the free work of someone else (say, Berkeley) and
rename their product (say, BSD Unix), make a few small additions and
produce something "new" (say, Ultrix).  From the perspective of UCB,
this is fine.  UCB is not committed to a vision of a world free of
encumbered software, so they don't care that DEC is reselling their
work.  UCB, CMU, MIT, etc., all have a different, academic, agenda,
which is well served by their respective licenses.  The problem is
that when I buy a software prodect (say, Ultrix) I have no way of
knowing that much (most?) of what I get can also be obtained from UCB
at little or no cost.  DEC will offer to sell me a source tape, but
they have no interest (in fact, they have a disincentive) to tell me
that what they are selling is just a repackaging of what UCB offers
for little or no money and little or no encumbrance.  A very similar
situation exists with BSD Ingres vs RTI Ingress, UNM Matlab vs the
commercial version, MIT Lisp machines vs Symbolics, etc.

The final popular approach is the copyleft.  This also has problems.
But, the chief difference is that its problems only apply to people
who fight the ultimate objective of making all software unencumbered.
BSD and CMU, for example, have no problem using GNU software, and
distributing it.  Major companies, like HP, OSF, and Intel actively
support the development of copylefted software, and are more than
willing to use it in their development.  It is only the people who
fight making all software ultimately unencumbered (and those who see
nothing wrong with helping such people arbitrarily far) who are hurt
by the copyleft.  This is better than the UCB license approach,
because that approach hurts chiefly people who are ignorant of the
true status of the software.  The copyleft prevents you from hiding
the rights everyone has to the software by concealing it.

None of these three methods produces a situation in which the software
works like it would in a post-encumbered world.  They all serve
different purposes.  To pretend that any one of them is being
dishonest, or sneaky, is wrong.  They each serve a different goal.
None of these methods produces perfectly free software.  They all
produce software which is free in some respects and not in others.
There is no way, in our current world, to write software to be free in
all the ways that software would be in a post-encumbrance world.

The purpose of the FSF is not to write software that everyone can use,
but to promote the creation of a world in which we avoid the
tremendous costs associated with the current methods of selling and
marketing commercial software.  In the process, we write a lot of
software that almost everyone can use, and it so happens that a lot of
people are willing to contribute to the creation of this software,
whether or not they agree with the ultimate goals of the FSF.