Re: Concerning uniliateral decision making with respect to the coreutils package

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Russ Allbery [13/Jul 10:59am -07] wrote:
> Simon Josefsson <[email protected]> writes:
>
>> I'm not denying people have other arguments too, including your
>> technical/social arguments.
>
>> That doesn't take away that some companies/governments/entities/people
>> has a dislike for strong copyleft licenses.  It limits their ability to
>> do what they want to do, which usually include some non-freedom aligned
>> agenda.
>
> While this is also true, this argument has been abused repeatedly by the
> Free Software Foundation and others to excuse and dismiss obvious
> technical and social problems. I have heard "you should use our inferior
> software and put up with our obnoxious development culture because we're
> copyleft" so many times now, and I for one am no longer susceptible to
> that argument.
>
> If you don't want people to use a non-copyleft alternative, may I suggest
> writing better software?

The way you've phrased this, you could substitute "free" for "copyleft"
and have an argument against using bothering to use free software in
general.  Obviously that's not what you think!  My point is that it
seems worth substantiating why you think we should have different
standards for what loss of functionality we should be willing to accept
for the sake of contributing to copyleft software, than what we should
be willing to accept for the sake of using free software.

I think it's the "contributing" that is key -- clearly some people find
it morally dispiriting to contribute to non-copyleft projects, but the
difference for users is smaller.

=2D-=20
Sean Whitton

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