Fwd: ESR/OSI's Unix/Linux-history-laden treatise on SCO vs. IBM

[Gary W. Swearingen]

"Eric S. Raymond" <esr at thyrsus.com> writes:

> It's fine for us to argue about among ourselves.  But from the point
> of view of any outsider, you're engaging in a theological dispute of
> *zero* interest.  I am therefore ignoring this distinction, very
> deliberately.

You could easily fix your few overreaches of GNU propaganda, with no
harm to the fact-based logic of your case.  What you instinctively aim
to do is to slip in claims about Linux which are untrue from the point
of view of an outsider (even if the claims seems true to those who've
adopted the GNU culture's self-serving language).

I'm not engaging in a theological dispute (about copyleftism,
presumably); it's an ethical dispute.  Copyleft was created specifically
to harm closed-source software development through the non-gift-culture
restrictions of the GPL, even at the high cost of harming other
open-source software.  It's a theology I seldom dispute, as it's as
valid as Bill Gates' and even better, given the actual gifting of the
copyleft right to copy non-derivatives.

But it's disingenuous to talk of "Linux code as a gift [...to be...]
used by others for all licit purposes both non-profit and for-profit".
Especially when you're trying to explain the nature of the Unix
tradition.  Even when talking to lawyers.  Winning a dispute is a poor
justification for using their more unsavory tactics; if you must resort
to such tactics, you don't deserve to win your case.  Honestly!

Copyleft propagandists just too-often find that the forum requires them
to ingore distinctions and propagandize about "free software" as if it
were a "non-proprietary" culture or even a BSD/MIT/X11 culture, when it
is predominately a copyleft guild culture, working together to crush
it's closed-source competition by the witholding of its proprietary
license to derive.  It's only after the bait-and-switch occurs, when
details must be discussed, that they will admit to the desire to control
the use of proprietary rights in code.  But I've yet to get one to admit
to the fact that their requirement for cross-licensing of the right to
distribute derivatives makes it a commercial license contract in
essence, let alone in fact.

My main beef with copyleftists has always been their propaganda tactics
and language.  And when I read this (in the berlin-design list) from the
father of copyleft, my beef was extended to other tactics:

    The license for the IDL file cannot stop this in an enforcible way.
    [...]

    However, using the GPL on IDL files might have a substantial
    practical effect even if it isn't legally airtight.  It might
    discourage much proprietary software from being written to talk to
    your objects, and it might convince many of the people who write
    programs that use your objects to make their programs free.

    So the real question is, what result do you want?

I hope that YOU will consider more than results to be important.