🚀 go-pugleaf

A basic principle of persuading people is that when you make a
suggestion, you should design it to serve the aims of the person you
hope will adopt it.  Otherwise, you might as well save your breath.

Recent suggestions for changes in FSF distribution terms have not
taken cognizance of this principle.  To save people a needless
discussion of how well these changes would appeal to them, I'd like to
explain why the FSF is not interested in certain sorts of ideas.

The aim of the GNU project is not maximizing the use of GNU software.
It is maximizing the extent to which we promote the freedom to share
software.  People might meaningfully discuss whether they agree with
our position, but it would be futile to doubt that it is our position.

Since our principal aim is to make an ethical point, we have to
practice what we preach.  What we preach is that software should be
free: everyone should have the right to copy and change it.  If we
were to engage in selling exceptions to this policy, we would be
justly regarded as hypocrites.

In addition, we have found a successful way of getting companies to
make improvements to GNU software and share them with us.  This is
requiring all extensions to GNU software to be free.  To drop this
requirement would be foolish.

It's nothing new that there are people who would like to use GNU
software on other terms than those on which it is available.
Periodically they suggest that we change the terms to permit whatever
it is that they would like to do.  I hope it is now clear why we don't
seriously consider these suggestions.