Weighing in on the Jalkut/GPL debate ...
Matt Mullenweg replies to Daniel Jalkut:
But he's wrong.
The crux of the argument:
It’s user freedom that the GPL was created to protect, just like the Bill of Rights was created to protect the people, not the President.
Lets get one thing straight: Users, in the sense of what Jalkut is talking about, ARE the developers using the GPL'd code. Its not Mom or Grandma running Linux as an end user, or using Open Office to replace Microsoft Office.
There's nothing inherent in any of the other more liberal open-source licenses preventing "users" (read: developers) from using the source available, that's why they exist as open-source licenses.
What the GPL does inherently _is_ to protect the President. The _ideal_ of the definition of free software as "a matter of the users’ freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software. More precisely, it refers to four kinds of freedom, for the users of the software [...]" is encapsulated in almost every other open-source license. The GPL exists specifically to force people to adhere to the original developers worldview.
Sure, its benevolent in intent, but its still a dictatorship.
