20130331 (Sunday, 31 March 2013)¶
Switching from GPL to BSD¶
My decision to switch from GPL to BSD was already done
when splitting the first versions of djangosite and North from Lino in March 2013,
but I didn’t yet take time
to do the dirty work of adapting the copyright headers in source files accordingly.
Now I did it for both djangosite
and north
.
See also djangosite.changes and north.changes.
Lino itself must yet remain GPL as long as the ExtJS and Ext.ensible
user interface are still integrated. The same applies to Lino-Welfare.
See docs/tickets/16
Why do I switch from GPL to BSD?
Because I have become more reasonable :-) I still believe that copyright is evil and should be abolished, and I acknowledge the GPL which uses the copyleft concept to fight against copyright, but I understood that fighting against it is –for me!– a waste of time. I believe that you should fight for the good things, not against the bad ones… And you cannot ask Beelzebul to fight against Satan…
Did I say that copyright is evil?
Maybe not evil, but at least nonsense. It is nonsense to claim property of something you said or wrote. As soon as you say something, the information has passed over to your listeners and it becomes their’s as well. Nobody can “own” an idea. We must find other methods for remunerating people who do creative spiritual work. The concepts of spiritual property and copyright are nonsense. Okay this nonsense has grown for historical reasons, yes, the patents laws have had their reasons to be, and no I don’t condemn the actors and no I don’t invite anybody to break existing laws and yes it will be much work for humanity to get rid of it… but still it is nonsense.
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