Re: GMail is using Hspell!

On Sun, Mar 12, 2006, Jonathan Ben Avraham wrote about "Re: GMail is using Hspell!":
> >public. I'm not even sure what I think about this issue - like I said - I
> >was not against Google using Hspell and I even asked them to do so. But I'm
> >starting to wonder where the line should be drawn: I'm quite pleased that
> >Google uses Hspell in a service it provides for free, but what if this was
> >a paid service? And will I be as pleased if Microsoft creates its first
> >paid "service" version of Microsoft Word and uses Hspell for its 
> >spell-checker?
> 
> Microsoft's use of Hspell in this case could be entirely within the spirit 
> of the GPL. There is no philosophical question to be asked or answered. 
> People who think that there is some link between not charging for a 
> service and Free Software (as defined by the FSF) are sorely mistaken. I 

I hope that everyone understands that I am fully aware that what Google (or
in my hypothetical example, Microsoft) did was perfectly legal, and when Dan
and I chose the GPL over some home-grown more restrictive license (which we
contemplated) we were aware of implications - including the fact that this
license says nothing against someone else profitting (financially) from our
work.

But I was making a point (which, again, I thought was more appropriate to
discuss in the discussions@hamakor list, not this one) that there *is*
a philosophical point to discuss here. People do choose the GPL (v2) license
over, say, the BSD license, because of the point that they don't want others
to take the free work that they have done and turn it into closed products.
When the GPL was first drafted, "proprietary software" was the main "threat"
and the only way to close up a previously open software. Other ways of
"closing" your previously open source, such as using it as a service (not
internally in a small company, but a service open to the public) or putting
it inside a hardware product - were simply not something that Richard Stallman
envisioned 2 decades ago as real threats to the three software world. I think
that he's starting to have second thoughts on this, but I'm not sure how
much of these thoughts actually reached the GPL 3 (I'm not sure what the
change of the verb "distribute" to "propagate" really means); Like I said,
I don't know yet what I think.

At the risk of sounding a communist, I think that Stallman's original
intention, and the intention of many free software authors, might have
been the old adage
	"Each should give according to his abilities, and receive according
         to his needs".
By this, I mean the following philosophy is behind some people's use of the
GPL: people who need software, should get it as much as they need without
any limitations. But those who can provide software (namely, free software
writers and software writers employed by corporations) are obliged to make
the software they write available to the world.
But as you say, this intention is not actually written in the GPL, whose
rules are much more specific and much less "communist" :-)


> not about software freedom. This is a step backwards, since the freedom to 
> charge for software and its use is enshrined in the GPL.

Well, charging for a CD (say) of some software doesn't close it in any way,
because the receiver of such a CD can make copies of it and give it to his
friends for free (or at another cost of his choice). *This* is what the
GPL tried to enshrine. The scenario I raised is something quite different -
building a service around (or using) some free software and profitting from
that, while keeping their changes or the code of the service closed.

-- 
Nadav Har'El                        |        Sunday, Mar 12 2006, 12 Adar 5766
nyh-TS7m/[email protected]             |-----------------------------------------
Phone +972-523-790466, ICQ 13349191 |Anyone who quotes me in their sig is an
http://nadav.harel.org.il           |idiot. -- Rusty Russell's sig.
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