The real heart of the GPLv3 rift
A badly researched Yahoo News piece recently characterized open source developers' reluctance to adopt the new GNU General Public License version 3 as creating "a rift in the open source community between idealists who believe all software should be free of charge and free to use, and pragmatists who want to see open source software make further inroads into commercial use." There are so many things wrong in that statement that I hardly know where to begin. Is it really so difficult to understand this stuff? Yes, there is a rift in the community -- if there is a single, cohesive, unanimous community at all -- but it's not for the reasons listed in this Yahoo story.
I guess I should start with the difference between open source and free software. One is a software design philosophy officially defined and maintained by a licensing cabal; the other is a set of moral values imposed through software licenses defined and maintained by a social/political movement. There has been a natural division between the two since the inception of the Open Source Initiative in 1998.
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