Couldn’t resist picking on this one. To say that we should all bow before the ideology layed down by the FSF and that “well, if the FSF doesn’t say it ain’t so, then it ain’t” is a bit far fetched. Just because the FSF doesn’t say “gmail is a problem, you should all not use it” doesn’t mean that there isn’t a conflict between source code liberated software and the gmail service. To wit, it’s not open source, software libre, give-all-your-code-to-me-you-proprietary-person in any way shape or form.
So I can see where someone with a “all software code should be “free”" attitude might take issue with it. I’m not of that attitude myself, I think you should be free to license what you program in any way you’d like. But I can understand the stance, leastways.
Personally, I’ll stick to doing what I think is right and let the FSF worry about how they’re going to get people to adopt the upcoming GPL v3. Who knows, maybe they’ll have to accept that the ability to sell software/support/services is vital to the creation of said software (I overstate on purpose, but still).
I’ve always found the GPL to be a convenient, widespread license. But I’ve never thought it to be an *ideal* license, just a good compromise that I can live with.
A non-free web? at Entropy
I’m not responsible for the software installed on someone else’s machine, especially if it’s a server. If it were the opposite case, the Free Software Foundation would advise people to use Netcraft to check every web site they visit to make sure that the server is running a free operating system. A waste of time.
