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Comment by anonymouz | Hacker News Reader

Anyone surprised by the fact that the FSF puts its principles about the purity of free software licenses before pragmatism hasn't been paying much attention. The GPLv3 is the flagship license of the FSF and they think it fixes some issues with the GPLv2, so it's hardly surprising that they will refuse to relicense their high priority projects under the older license. "But you'll gain more users" has never been a reason for the FSF to compromise on their principles.

One may equally well ask why LibreCAD insists on GPLv2 (without upgrade clause), and does not switch to GPLv3 if they want to use GPLv3 libraries.

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LibreCAD doesn't hold the copyright, so they can't change the license. The copyright is held by a private company with no particular incentive to make the Free product better, especially since the paid product wouldn't be able to use the LibreDWG code.

You seem to forget the primary reason why the GPL came to be, the principle that caused RMS to rewrite EMACS as an open source product in the first place: if a piece of software is closed, or in this case "not open enough", they want it rewritten under a new license.

This story only seems to be a case of political pressure to do so, regardless of the effort a rewrite may cause. In this regards, FSF is clearly putting the value of the license above the value of the software itself.

This is why I can't endorse the GPL: it is mainly motivated and designed to deny authority over software ownership, not for actual openness. If somebody really want to open up a piece of software, Public Domain is the way to go.

In a lot of countries, it's impossible to put something in the public domain immediately.

MIT, BSD and to some extent Apache2 are close enough that the distinction is meaningless.

That's an excellent point. Would you have any advice/thoughts on how to license software in those countries with the same effect as public domain, and also how to plan ahead so that it eventually becomes public domain?

no, the GPL is mainly motivated and designed to encourage openness and collaboration among authors. It removes authority: if you wish to use the code, do whatever you want with it, as long as you share the changes with the rest of the people that are interested in it.

There's the problem right there: "as long as". If I give you candy, I should have no say who gets to eat it - or even cook with it if he fancies. I don't like gifts with strings attached, so I don't cause others to suffer them.

This comment is basically nonsense. Not saying I agree or disagree, it just makes no sense as a response to my comment. I was making a factual correction. The GP suggested that LibreCAD change their license. I pointed out that doing so is not possible and not likely to become possible. That is all.

You are discussing the impossibility of a simple relicensing due to components owned by a third party. I am pointing out that the FSF has a history of going to great lengths rewriting software, or pressuring people to do so, just so the resulting product falls under a license they find acceptable. Can you explain how am I being nonsensical?

So a more or less a "random circumstance" is the reason the FSF should be changing it's principles?

I mean, there may be times when the FSF does stick foolishly to principles but the "because we've decided it's OK to be halfway open and accept putting copyright control in the hands of a random company, you should bend for us" argument does not seem compelling.

It sounds like the mom and kids dynamic "can't I break the rules this one time, [XXXX very 'just, reasonable' sounding excuse]". The reason you have blanket principles is that otherwise someone finds a single exception that sounds emotionally compelling, then the exception becomes the hole that more or less everyone just drives through and "inconvenient" principles go out the window.

Also, the article doesn't say anything one way or the other about releasing the library LGPL which would seem appropriate for a library which could then be used by a commercial product.

I never said the FSF should change its principles. I was just pointing out that the GP's suggestion wasn't possible.

At this point, they should probably worry less about "gaining" users and more about "alienating" them.

> "But you'll gain more users" has never been a reason for the FSF to compromise on their principles.

Wasn't that the main motivation for the LGPL?

Kinda. It was more "it would only hurt us", though in practice, the way it was likely to hurt them was through lower usage.

The official statement is: "Using the ordinary GPL is not advantageous for every library. There are reasons that can make it better to use the Lesser GPL in certain cases. The most common case is when a free library's features are readily available for proprietary software through other alternative libraries. In that case, the library cannot give free software any particular advantage, so it is better to use the Lesser GPL for that library.

This is why we used the Lesser GPL for the GNU C library. After all, there are plenty of other C libraries; using the GPL for ours would have driven proprietary software developers to use another—no problem for them, only for us."

> "But you'll gain more users" has never been a reason for the FSF to compromise on their principles.

Actually, rms recommended a more liberal license for Ogg/Vorbis.

http://lwn.net/2001/0301/a/rms-ov-license.php3

The FSF's stance on this has been very clear, to me at least, since I first read the gnu.org essays when I was maybe 15 years old.

This is the most relevant section I can quote:

> Using the ordinary GPL is not advantageous for every library. There are reasons that can make it better to use the Lesser GPL in certain cases. The most common case is when a free library's features are readily available for proprietary software through other alternative libraries. In that case, the library cannot give free software any particular advantage, so it is better to use the Lesser GPL for that library.

From https://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-not-lgpl.html

Stallman's recommendation of a liberal license for the vorbis libraries seems similar: there are already proprietary standards and proprietary libraries for lossy audio compression, so using a copyleft license won't convince anyone to switch their license.

This particular instance with LibreDWG is the polar opposite of that: no other library exists that does what LibreDWG does, so it makes sense to keep LibreDWG on the GPLv3, to entice projects like LibreCAD to use the GPLv3.

The sort of entitlement that this request displays is somewhat astonishing -- do the LibreCAD developers really expect the FSF to back down not only on its principles, but also its strategies?

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