[ Thanks to Kelly
McNeill for this link. ]
“ost people defending the GPL would now argue that the GPL is
about protecting the right to share ideas with others without
having somebody else steal those ideas and not giving something in
return. Which is true, but arguing that would ignore the real
freedoms the GPL protect.”
“The GPL protects the right of the software to be free. Free
software is about the freedom of the software. Software _really_
wants to be free. There are a thousand ways to say it, and shoving
this particular idea aside as irrelevant is easy enough, but it
actually embodies the core of the GPL….”
“By definition, any piece of software that is any good is an
embodiment of one or more ideas. Following this line of reasoning,
any logic which applies to ideas in general will apply to software.
Reasoning from the other end, for software to want something
(freedom) it must be alive, and it must have some way to
think.“