FORTUNE: Legal pad

This is a great example of the hypocrisy of the GNU GPL and the associated ideology that is so much baggage.

From the GNU website:

“Free software” is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should think of “free” as in “free speech”, not as in “free beer”.

Free software is a matter of the users’ freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software. More precisely, it refers to four kinds of freedom, for the users of the software:

• The freedom to run the program, for any purpose (freedom 0).
• The freedom to study how the program works, and adapt it to your needs (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
• The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2).
• The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits (freedom 3). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.

This all sounds great. I’m not a subscriber to the “software wants to be free” ideology that Richard Stallman advocates (which is simple socialism with communist fantasies – it’s not even disguised, it’s blatant). What bothers me most about GNU is their inconsistency with their own goals.

Users of software get the 4 enumerated freedoms; that is, unless the user is Microsoft or anyone that wants to work with Microsoft. You’re free to redistribute copies, and run the program for any purpose, unless it’s under the protected of patents and used for the purpose of generating a profit for a company that doesn’t write “liberated” software. “Freedom” #3 (the last one) is the worst one: you’re free to make improvements to this “free” software, so long as you give your work away for free and impose the same restrictions on users of your derivative work.

It basically boils down to GNU insisting that restrictions on software are bad, unless they’re the restrictions GNU says are good. This is why I prefer BSD/MIT-compatible licensing, and the OpenBSD operating system in particular. BSD licensed software is truly “free”, as GNU claims they want, but BSD doesn’t force any license restrictions on the user – it doesn’t have the GPL “viral effect”. Many people who write BSD-licensed software believe “software should be free”, but at least they actually practice what they preach instead of brow-beating people into submission like GNU does.

I know this is all old news, and the merits and/or problems with the GPL have been debated ad nauseum across many sites on the internet, but this particular article describing how GNU is coming up with new and creative ways to put more licensing restrictions into the GPL v3 really rubbed me the wrong way.