[Tfug] GPL Worthless?

[Zack Williams]

To understand the GPL, you have to understand the FSF and Richard
Stallman.  Here's a guy who, working at MIT, got frustrated that code
was being taken and put into things like printers, the result of which
was that they were buggy and impossible to fix or tinker with, so he
came up with a license-based solution to it.

The GPL put the desires of savvy coder/users (the only kind at the
time it was written) ahead of 3rd party developers, who wouldn't
release source and thus their products couldn't easily be tinkered
with or fixed.   And he did it by writing a license that prevented any
of his code from being included into distributed products without
being also shared to the recipient. In the end, he hoped to be able to
run a completely free operating system, and in this goal he was
successful (see here: http://richard.stallman.usesthis.com) The rest
of the issues (releases being buggy/unbuildable, spaghetti code, etc.)
are implementation details that would be present with any software
product or release.

Your goals are probably different, on some level.  You might care much
more about a specific job being performed than forcing the hand of
others who want to improve your work.   You might be in the same
situation as RMS with regards to your household appliances, but with
little power to effect change.

Everyone violates software licenses - I love this bit from a Microsoft
slide deck, where their biggest competitor by far is "unlicensed"
Windows:

http://www.osnews.com/story/21035/Ballmer_Linux_Bigger_Competitor_than_Apple

If enforcement of licensing was complete and total, I'd wager we'd
have a lot more "free" (by any meaning of the word) software use out
there, just to avoid the entire licensing hassle.

We haven't even gotten into the patent system nightmares that clauses
of the Apache and similar licenses try to protect from, while allowing
commercial use like the BSD licenses.

- Zack