> Yeah, I often see on HN (what are presume are younger developers) who never lived in a world were OSes, languages, frameworks, toolkits were not free. Everything cost a pretty penny. Open source software en-large would have been such an alien concept telling people it was going to be the future, they'd think it was crazy talk. Now it is taken for granted ... too much for granted perhaps. And they love to hate GPL and make fun of Stallman and how if someone releases GPLed software they are being anachronistic and hostile and it is hurting their Uber for Dogs startup and so on.
Not all young developers are like that. I definitely recognise how lucky we are to live in a world where software freedom exists. And considering the fact that Torvalds doesn't believe in software freedom, it's astonishing that we even have a GNU/Linux system (if Linux had been BSD licensed I doubt it would be as prevalent). The GPL was definitely one of the most brilliant legal hacks in software history.
> Source for that? I thought I read a quote from him saying that GPL licensing the Linux kernel was the best decision he ever made.
If you ever hear his explanation of why he used the GPL (which boils down to "I give you code, you give me code back, we're even"[1]) skips over the software freedom aspect. Not to mention that he's one of the advocates of the open source movement which doesn't have any views on software freedom.
I can't give you an explicit quote where he said "I don't care about software freedom", but it becomes quite clear if you look at his actions (particularly toward the GPLv3, where he clearly differentiates his views from the FSF's views[1] -- and he carefully avoids using the term "freedom").
There is a quote where he claims that vendor lock-in isn't morally bad[2], which is the best I could find after 10 minutes of searching:
> The GPLv3 doesn't match what I think is morally where
I want to be. I think it is ok to control peoples hardware.
Voluntary control & choice of control vendors, maybe.
But enforced monopolistic control - c'mon there is no freedom there.
Not to mention legally enforced monopolies destroy the market for everyone, including themselves.
Pretty much the 1st observation Adam Smith makes.
Without freedom and thus competition there is no progress, everything stagnates.
Music & film industry is a case in point, every change they lobby against turns out to be insanely profitable when they are forced into it. ( 78's, radio, videos, mp3 , streaming - all were going to 'kill' the industry till they didn't )
Fat cats won't change or innovate without competition.
> Yeah, I often see on HN (what are presume are younger developers) who never lived in a world were OSes, languages, frameworks, toolkits were not free. Everything cost a pretty penny. Open source software en-large would have been such an alien concept telling people it was going to be the future, they'd think it was crazy talk. Now it is taken for granted ... too much for granted perhaps. And they love to hate GPL and make fun of Stallman and how if someone releases GPLed software they are being anachronistic and hostile and it is hurting their Uber for Dogs startup and so on.
Not all young developers are like that. I definitely recognise how lucky we are to live in a world where software freedom exists. And considering the fact that Torvalds doesn't believe in software freedom, it's astonishing that we even have a GNU/Linux system (if Linux had been BSD licensed I doubt it would be as prevalent). The GPL was definitely one of the most brilliant legal hacks in software history.