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

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Russ Allbery [26/Jul  5:33pm -07] wrote:
> Free software provides me with features inherent in its status of free
> software that non-free software does not. It is therefore difficult to
> argue that free software is clearly inferior to any non-free software
> because, whatever other merits it has, it grants me those features
> (freedoms), and those matter to me.
>
> There are cases where the non-free software is sufficiently better that I
> can't justify using the free software despite those freedoms, but the free
> software has, for people like me who care about those freedoms, a
> substantial inherent advantage due to its licensing.
>
> This is not true of copyleft software specifically, as distinct from the
> category of free software in general. Copyleft software does not give me,
> as a software user, anything of immediate value over BSD-licensed
> software. In fact, it's objectively worse in several small ways because
> there is a long, tedious legal document that I have to read and follow
> that limits my freedom to change and redistribute the software as I choose
> by, for example, prohibiting me from removing sometimes-annoying output
> from commands.

I see, thank you, I understand better now.

> When chosing a license for one's own work, the cost of the insurance is
> not egregious, and it annoys me more than it annoys others, so I
> understand the position of people who always adopt the insurance. But this
> is a tactical decision, not an ethical one.

It still seems to me that the position of the user of the software and
the developer of the software will be different in this regard.  To the
user qua user it's just a tool, but to the developer it may be an
ethical choice, in the expressive sense that I outlined in my other
message.

=2D-=20
Sean Whitton

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