The meme that the GPL is "less free" sounds very Orwellian.
What it really means is that I cannot freely use someone else's creation without restriction, and that I have to respect the wishes of the original author about how their work should be used.
That is because GPL was intended to be a hack on the copyright system (hence "copyleft"), but it always respected the idea of copyright - it does not call for the abolition of copyright.
This talk of GPL being "not free" smells of propaganda so that people (big corporations?) can reuse and repackage others' valuable work for free without any kind of compensation or acknowledgement. (TFA says the same thing)
Feel free not to use GPL'ed code if you find it too restrictive, but please don't contribute to spreading propaganda against it (and get off my lawn while you're at it)
[For the record, I work on proprietary software myself and haven't written any FOSS code, but I use GPL software daily - Linux, gcc, emacs etc]
The meme that the GPL is "less free" sounds very Orwellian.
What it really means is that I cannot freely use someone else's creation without restriction, and that I have to respect the wishes of the original author about how their work should be used.
That is because GPL was intended to be a hack on the copyright system (hence "copyleft"), but it always respected the idea of copyright - it does not call for the abolition of copyright.
This talk of GPL being "not free" smells of propaganda so that people (big corporations?) can reuse and repackage others' valuable work for free without any kind of compensation or acknowledgement. (TFA says the same thing)
Feel free not to use GPL'ed code if you find it too restrictive, but please don't contribute to spreading propaganda against it (and get off my lawn while you're at it)
[For the record, I work on proprietary software myself and haven't written any FOSS code, but I use GPL software daily - Linux, gcc, emacs etc]