Stallman is an Extremist

I have a few word to say in response to the zdnet article 'Apache or GPL?' mikefarinha had posted a comment regarding Richard Stallman in which he said "I'm sorry but the GPL crowd bastardizes the word freedom how they use it." mikefarinha had quoted several paragraphs written and spoken by Stallman.

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agreed, stallman is an extremist...
but if you own a dell laptop, all of your drivers and diagnostic utilities were shipped in a fat16 partition that boots FreeDos. freedos is the answer to those situations where you have to have an os, just not one that take 2.5 gig of space. freedos is a gpl project. many many companies use it for boot utilities such as memory checkers, hard drive diagnostics, flashing your bios. there's a hundred more that i fail to remember.

now, had the freedos project not been started, those tools may not be so easy to use, after all, MS discontinued MS Dos. now, whether or not development continues past FreeDos 1.0, it will be available forever. it's open source. no one in particular owns it. use it, modify it, donate to the project if you want development to continue. whether it does or not tho, freedos will still be available for those small projects that need an os, just not the biggest most powerful thing available.

likewise, even if microsoft and apple go belly up (and i hope they never do). these wonderful machines that we have laying around will still have an operating system to run them. if world war 3 were to happen tomorrow and every company on this planet were to be destroyed, somewhere there will survive a copy of linux and it's source code. we will survive. we will rebuild, we will not have to hack something together from scratch.

it's okay if you prefer closed source software. it's okay if you use code from my own little fserve project and don't donate money to me. i had fun putting it together. i learned quite a bit doing it. it looks good on a resume. it's okay. we can all be friends. i like open source for the development cycle. it's kinda like the weather in arkansas, if you don't like it... wait five minutes, it'll change.

i like open source because if it doesn't work, i might just learn something trying to make it work. i like it because when i needed an fserve, the one i found didn't quite do what i needed... so i made it do what i needed. now i may be the team lead on a project of one, but at least i didn't have to write it from scratch.

stallman is crazy, but crazy makes headlines. that, i think, is what he wants to do. it gets us attention. thats okay. i personally don't care for gpl. i think it is too restrictive. i write code and post it to the public under a bsdish license because i want it to be there the next time i need it. my fserve still uses a lot of the original code that was released gpl, so i have to release my changes under the gpl. thats okay.

i released a gdm theme under gpl, because the theme i based it on was gpl. last time i lost a hard drive, i was able to find my theme on the internet and download it. so that okay.

so i guess gpl is okay, some are more diehard than i am. but thats okay, i use it because i don't want to have to write the same code all over again. it's like reinventing the wheel. by the way, can you imagine where linux could go if both microsoft and apple would lay down their battle-axes and cooperate?

There were a couple of very inteligent responses to my posting, you can follow them here. Once your done with that comment, just scroll down to find a few other intelligent responses.