Why is Fedora not a Free GNU/Linux distributions?

[Les Mikesell]

Alexandre Oliva wrote:
> 
>> You seem to be implying that the GPL is necessary for cooperation.
>> That is just not true.
> 
> Agreed.  It's just better for everyone involved in the cooperation
> than permissive licenses.

No it isn't.  There is never a down side to permitting additional uses. 
  They never reduce the possibilities for the original work.

   To understand why, have a look at
> http://www.lsd.ic.unicamp.br/~oliva/papers/free-software/BMind.pdf

Your scenarios have nothing to do with real-world possibilities. You 
need to permute your license cost chart for all possible recombinations 
of code components and note the places where you can't even make an 
entry.  Imagine if the reference TCP implementation had been GPL'd and 
no commercial systems used it because of the restrictive license.  We'd 
still be struggling to make any two different systems communicate today.

>> Again, the fact that under certain restricted conditions it may be
>> possible to reuse the code does not eliminate the damage caused by the
>> restrictions that prevent many other uses.
> 
> /me refers to the 1-month-ago thread on fedora-devel in which I
> thought it had become clear that GPL didn't impose any such
> restrictions, it was copyright law that did.

That's equally true and equally irrelevant, for those proprietary 
licenses that you don't like, so its not much of an argument, especially 
from you.  Saying that the GPL is better than a sharp stick in the eye 
still doesn't make it a good thing.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com