Because frankly, some of the almost religious overtones of rms and the FSF were just nutty, and a certain portion of the community was actively driving commercial use away.
You know why the FSF and rms come across as "nutty" at times? Because without them, and without their voices being occasionally heard, PC hardware would have been as completely tied to Microsoft by now as Apple is to OSX, and we'd certainly have had another copyright extension act to boot. If they have to be loud and repetitive at times,
No, but it doesn't invalidate what they were deadset right about. For whatever Stallman's many faults, there is an obvious undercurrent of corporate interests behind the current opposition to the FSF. The GPL is simply a thorn in the side of anyone who wants to freeload off open source software.
RMS's problem, which is the FSF's problem, is that he want's no commercial usage possible.
The BSD license is good enough for everyone. GPL2 is "good enough" for specific uses, but completely inappropriate for commercial software that isn't intended to be continuously developed (eg games.)
Some software actually needs to be "BSD-like" licensed because it commercial users don't use it, we get fragmentation. The entire reason we don't have 9000 versions of TCP/IP is because the original BSD TCP/IP stac
"Nuttiness" (Score:5, Insightful)
You know why the FSF and rms come across as "nutty" at times? Because without them, and without their voices being occasionally heard, PC hardware would have been as completely tied to Microsoft by now as Apple is to OSX, and we'd certainly have had another copyright extension act to boot. If they have to be loud and repetitive at times,
Re: (Score:5, Informative)
One can be nutty and right at the same time. That doesn't make them any less nutty.
Re: (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:1, Troll)
Nonsense.
RMS's problem, which is the FSF's problem, is that he want's no commercial usage possible.
The BSD license is good enough for everyone. GPL2 is "good enough" for specific uses, but completely inappropriate for commercial software that isn't intended to be continuously developed (eg games.)
Some software actually needs to be "BSD-like" licensed because it commercial users don't use it, we get fragmentation. The entire reason we don't have 9000 versions of TCP/IP is because the original BSD TCP/IP stac
Re:"Nuttiness" (Score:1)
Nonsense.
RMS's problem, which is the FSF's problem, is that he want's no commercial usage possible.
That's not true, otherwise GCC would have been licensed such that anything it produced had to be distributed with accompanying source code.