It's not just disrespectful, it's stupid and dangerous. GPL is one of those exceptional things that shaped the world as it is today. These projects are nothing more than an attack to our freedom.
Whatever the masses do can always have impact on what you can do, or are forced to do. For example quitting your job, because you want to use the libre tool, when your employer tries to force you to use the proprietary tool. "Why can't you be a good employee like eeeeveryone else?"
Only the original as delivered by the original dev-team. The derivatives can be, and often are, closed off. That's the opposite of "free and open source".
very freedom
The Playdate console seems a lot friendlier to developers and end users alike, but that's precisely because they're a smaller player in the market and need that advantage. Same dynamic played out with drivers for SCSI controllers, and GPUs under Linux, where the biggest players were the last to provide quality open source support. Seems to have a lot more to do with market position than with licenses, to me.
Would I prefer every computer be open to general purpose computing, and infinitely hackable by it's owner? Sure. But I also respect that they have reasons not to take that route. And as consoles and PCs converge, there are fewer and fewer reasons for me to be upset about one manufacturer's choices. I voted with my dollars and bought a Steam Deck. I think the preservation of culture is a much stronger argument for breaking console DRM and emulation.
Projects like MiSTer are very inspiring. Risc-V as well. Sam Zeloof's garage chip fab work too. And we even have reasonable platforms for developing open source phone stacks like Pinephone - I remember the bad old days of OpenMoko.
I think proprietary chips and boards are about to go the way of proprietary *nix. It'll take a decade or more, and lots of work. But the future's never looked brighter for open systems.
I don't need the fastest or lowest power devices though. I'd happily trade some of each for a more flexible future-proof machine. I just need an FPGA big enough to hold a linux-capable core or two, with graphics and audio and networking at an affordable price. Bonus points if it has some extra space for developing new peripherals.
I think it'd be pretty easy to design something to conform to the raspberry pi compute module interface, for example, which would make it a drop-in replacement for lots of useful systems like laptops, NUCs, and other such stuff. Gotta love defacto standard interfaces.
That's the point: if they don't want to contribute their changes back, they should spend their own money writing their own software.
Right now, they'd take thousands of hours of effort from the community, add a few hundred of their own and then close off the product from the very community that they so willingly took this charity from. Yay BSD license!
If they had to use QNX or similar, they'd pay to do it. If they had to use GPL, they'd pay to close off their changes, which would be great for funding more free software.
> For better or worse, all the big console manufacturers see their ability to lock down their platform as vital to their development and business strategies. Vital to their ability to charge $60 for a few gigabytes of 1s and 0s.
Well that's why I divided the licenses into "pro-user" and "pro-corporate". The BSDs are pro-corporate.
Last I checked there were about a thousand open source OSes. Hundreds under BSD-like licenses. Here's a partial list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_BSD_operating_systems
It sounds like you're advocating for wiping them all from history and outlawing everything but GPL licensed code, which just isn't possible, nor desirable. Sorry?
That's a strawman: Nothing I said implied any sort of genocide.
I'm pointing out that the pro-user license has more benefits than the pro-corporate licenses.
Is there another reading of "If they had to use" that I'm not aware of? Seems to imply force either through legal or practical means.
> the pro-user license has more benefits than the pro-corporate licenses
I'm a user and a developer and neither of those descriptions seem to apply to the licenses being discussed. I benefit from both, as do you, as does the whole world.
I bet proprietary software vendors get a real chuckle out of this sort of infighting.
Well, yes.
You started your argument with "If BSD wasn't available they'd be using QNX".
So I followed on from that with "If they had to use QNX... If they had to use GPL..."
I was just following the logical outcome of your "If BSD wasn't available" argument, not advocating that BSD must not be available.
> I'm a user and a developer and neither of those descriptions seem to apply to the licenses being discussed.
I don't know how you can think that "pro-user" doesn't apply to the GPL - it's the singular goal of the GPL to protect user freedoms. This has never been ambiguous.
GPL == freedom for the user. It's always been this way. This is nothing new. You cannot, with a straight face and at this point in the conversation, claim that you didn't know the goal of the GPL.
As far as the pro-corporate aspect of BSD, that's pretty clear to me, because of how extensively corporations were able to mine BSD code for shareholder benefit.
So, yeah, with BSD, you might argue differently (for example, argue that corporate mining of BSD code is a side-effect), but there is no way to argue that GPL isn't pro-user.
Your words. My words indicate that I see both licenses and being pro-everyone.
> As far as the pro-corporate aspect of BSD, that's pretty clear to me, because of how extensively corporations were able to mine BSD code for shareholder benefit.
Mining is an ecologically destructive activity which bears no resemblance to using software under the terms which it was licensed.
C'mon... It improves memory safety!
I agree with GPL being a way to protect the investment in the commons so it remains "freer" than with MIT/BSD licensed code. But in the cloud platform world this is has show to be not so helpful (hence we need the AGPL). Both GPL and AGPL are (AGPL more so) shunned by big biz: this is a blessing (fuck 'm) and a curse (they have much money to invest).
All open source releases are extending the commons (freely available to everyone), so if MIT/BSD code is released I still cheer for that (even if it clones GPL code).