[U-Boot] U-book and GPLv3? (fwd)

[Robin Getz]

On Tue 30 Jun 2009 15:12, Richard Stallman pondered:
> 
>     That is great - and I applaud your efforts. I think that the work
>     you are doing is valuable, and the contributions you have made have
>     been critically important to the free and closed software developments
>     that people to today. 
> 
> If you mean that my work has contrubuted to non-free software
> developments, I am not proud of that.  It is not a good thing that
> people develop or use non-free software.

Not to go down a rat hole - but as a normal part of development of non-free 
software, people use emacs, gcc, and gdb all the time - you aren't proud of 
the contributions you made to those projects?


I was trying to say that your efforts have changed the face of computing in 
general, in both that it has created the "free" and "non-free" software 
software categories, and helped inform users of their freedoms they should be 
expecting. 


To use someone else's words - an IDC 2006 study "Open Source in Global 
Software: Market Impact, Disruption, and Business Models" described free 
software and open source as "the most significant all-encompassing and 
long-term trend that the software industry has seen since the early 1980s" 
and found that over 70 percent of all developers are leveraging open-source 
and free software.

In any movement - there needs to be the golden standard - that is unwavering 
in its ethics and standards. Not everyone likes that standard - but it needs 
to be there.