GMP forked; Torbjorn Granlund: "blatant falsehoods and sinister insinuations"

[Vincent Lefevre]

On 2008-05-29 11:52:03 -0700, William Stein wrote:
> 1. FACT: (L)GPLv3 cannot be used by some companies.  See below where
> I discuss this issue at length.
[...]
> 5. FACT: Some extremely capable developers do not want to contribute to
> an LGPL'd project, because they don't want their voluntary contributions
> to be used by Maple, Mathematica and Magma to make money.

And some extremely capable developers may not want to contribute
(or stay) to an (L)GPLv2 project because they don't want to be
attacked by some companies on the software patent subject (or
more generally don't want the whole community to be attacked).

Whatever the licences you choose, you'll always have companies
and/or developers who do not like them. For good reasons.

> A company-wide requirement at Microsoft is that they do not run any
> GPLv3 code, not even binaries.  This is not surprising in light
> of numerous quotes by Stallman about how GPLv3 was designed
> partly to attack Microsoft.  For example:
> 
>  Stallman: "The point of the GPLv3 conditions that apply to the
>  Novell/Microsoft deal is to give the rest of the community a defense
>  against Microsoft's patent threats. If these conditions do their job,
>  the result will be that Microsoft never goes beyond threats, and the
>  community is safe."
>  http://www.technewsworld.com/story/must-read/59780.html?welcome=1212081285

This needs to be corrected: (L)GPLv3 code is not there to attack
Microsoft, but to protect the whole community against attacks from
companies such as Microsoft.

-- 
Vincent Lefèvre <vincent at vinc17.org> - Web: <http://www.vinc17.org/>
100% accessible validated (X)HTML - Blog: <http://www.vinc17.org/blog/>
Work: CR INRIA - computer arithmetic / Arenaire project (LIP, ENS-Lyon)