Re: [tlug] [OT] Say _no_ to the Microsoft Office format as an ISO standard

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <turnbull@example.com>]

david.blomberg@example.com writes:

 > No it is the golden rule (I am not religious but do believe in the
 > golden rule).  I do not "demand anything". All I say is, I gave the code
 > away if you use it I expect you to do the same.

But that is *not* the golden rule I learned.  The golden rule I
learned was addressed to *me*, and governs how *I* do unto others; it
has nothing to say about what I may expect *others* to do unto me.

This is precisely the BSD license philosophy:

    "I would like you to give me your code, so I will give you mine."

    "And then?"

    "Just take it; the rest is up to you."

I don't think that Stallman would agree that the GNU philosophy is
based on the golden rule, either as I learned it or as you phrased it
above.  I think that rather he would say, "Human beings *like* to
share with other members of their community.  I want to enable them to
satisfy their need to share, but 'it takes a village'.  At bigger than
village scale, the temptation to try to accumulate bigger than
village-scale fortunes is great.  The village needs a wall to keep out
the Gordon Gecko (or Steel Partners, if you prefer a more recent bete
noire :-) barbarians.  The GPL is our wall."

My personal opinion is that the BSD philosophy is (unsurprisingly,
since it's a West Coast philosophy) is more modern, more adapted to
the world we actually live in than the GNU philosophy (which is, after
all, an East Coast philosophy).  Note that the BSDers are not
Pollyannas, more optimistic about human nature than the GNUbies.
Rather, they're more optimistic about the invisible hand.

 > (we are talking about end products here not libraries right--I think I
 > would only release libraries under LGPL in which case fine use them as
 > the base and keep what you want)

I'm glad to hear that about your preferences.  However, that is not
the FSF line; the FSF line is that the LGPL is the *lesser* GPL, and
should be used *only* where there is already permissively licensed
competition.  Thus GNU readline is GPLed.  I think that the same is
true of many GNOME libraries (ISTR that librsvg is, although some,
like libxml2, are permissively licensed).

 > The same redmond company has been fairly famous in the past for taking
 > BSD licensed code and including it in its own OS.  I never saw any
 > updates from them in BSD though.

I haven't heard any complaints from BSD developers about that, except
that they really wish nobody knew about it because MSFT's derived code
is so famously buggy. ;-)

I think it's time I started a blog ....