This is a bit of a departure from my usual rants against MS Office and extolling the virtues of OpenOffice.org and other open source programs. However, I gotta call stupid acts stupid when and where I see them regardless of who is making them. So we come to the politics of licenses, specifically in open source licenses.
There are already an abundance of open source licenses ("license proliferation") available, that are mostly incompatible with one another and the code sharing they supposedly promote. The FSF (Free Software Foundation) has been busy revamping the GPL into GPLv3 amid much heated discussion between supporters and detractors, that has its own politics and evangelism attached to it. So along come two stories via NewsForge about modified GPLv2 licenses.
The first "Extending the GPL for application service providers" is an attempt to make everyone distribute their modified GPL code, even though the compiled binaries are not being released to the public. This is so total asinine I'm not even sure where to begin to comment on it.
The second story "Open source project adds "no military use" clause to the GPL" is almost worse in its stupidity...No, it is vastly worse. Basically, the program is made available to use for only those that are willing to "fight" for pacifism. No conflict my ass.
to be continued...
These are miscellaneous thoughts and musings I have when I get around to posting them.
