Ghost stories

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Aaron Bentley writes:

 > Obviously copyleft licenses are not compatible in a legal sense.  I was
 > speaking of philosophical compatibility.  A change that rendered the
 > GPL3 unpalatable to a significant fraction of existing GPL2 users would
 > have been against the interest of those creating the GPL3.

Surely, RMS doesn't think that way.  Consider how he labels Linus and
Debian and anyone who doesn't agree with the major tenets of his
licensing philosophy 100% as "unfriendly" and "wrongheaded", and makes
the changes he wants anyway.  I have to think that the absence of an
Affero clause from GPLv3 proper is due to philosophical reservations
about its role in licensing free software.

That doesn't mean it would be a bad idea for Canonical to adopt a
policy of publishing everything it develops, but I think an attempt to
argue on the basis of "the spirit of the GPL" is poorly founded.