Re: Licence of ts-comint

[Richard Stallman]

[[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider    ]]]
[[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
[[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]

It is true that some people ridicule us for using the GNU GPL.  Mostly
they either don't value the purpose, or don't even know what the
purpose is.

If you don't understand the job the GNU GPL is meant to do, you can't
make a rational argument that it fails to do the job, or that it is
unnecessary.

The purpose of the GNU GPL is to make sure all users of GNU programs
get the freedom to control them.  For an explanation of these
freedoms, see https://gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html.

We have seen free programs be replaced by modified versions which are
proprietary.  That happened in 1984 with Tex: the original version was
free, but TeX for Unix was nonfree.  That happened in the 80s and 90s
with X Windows -- the original version was free, but Unix variants
typically came with nonfree versions of X, and no free version would
run on them.

Now it is happening with LLVM.  Because LLVM is under a weak license,
it gave nVidia an easy way to make a proprietary compiler for its GPU.

If LLVM were GPL'd -- or if it did not exist -- nVidia would have had
to use a GPL'd starting point, would have had to make its version
free, would have had to reveal the GPU's instruction set -- which
would have been a great and important victory for freedom.

Copyleft is vital for the cause of freedom.  Apple opposes freedom,
and Google doesn't care much either way.  That is why they support
the development of a non-copylefted compiler.

-- 
Dr Richard Stallman
President, Free Software Foundation (gnu.org, fsf.org)
Internet Hall-of-Famer (internethalloffame.org)
Skype: No way! See stallman.org/skype.html.