In Debt: The First 5,000 Years, anthropologist David Graeber explores the fascinating history of debt and economies. It starts out by debunking the common myth that prior to coinage, everyone were trapped in this inefficient mode of barter. If you had a chicken to give and wanted sugar from Gandalf, but Gandalf was a vegetarian, you ha...
It’s the way of Stallman and the GPL license. Walking around with the scowl that someone might take your software, and do things with it you wouldn’t like (such as extending it without sharing those extensions).
Which has just never seemed like a very appealing temperament to me. I’m not interested in making software together with people or companies who’d rather not. Who are extorted into collaboration by a software license. Maybe that worked for Linux, but it seems like a pessimistic, angry, and, frankly, counterproductive way to entice, and actually respect, people.
While I think this article raise some good points, I think he is mistaken about the GPL (Vs. MIT). The GPL was created in a time when the default was not sharing (or rather not sharing anymore), and had the purpose of nudging people back into the sharing by default mind-set. There IMHO isn’t really any bitterness in that contrary to what the (much younger) author seems to think.
This is different from today, when “open-source has won” and the default usually is sharing code (again). And I think this is largely due to the fact that GPL software has shown that this is hands-down the better development model and thus even MIT license software benefits from this indirectly these days.
While I think this article raise some good points, I think he is mistaken about the GPL (Vs. MIT). The GPL was created in a time when the default was not sharing (or rather not sharing anymore), and had the purpose of nudging people back into the sharing by default mind-set. There IMHO isn’t really any bitterness in that contrary to what the (much younger) author seems to think.
This is different from today, when “open-source has won” and the default usually is sharing code (again). And I think this is largely due to the fact that GPL software has shown that this is hands-down the better development model and thus even MIT license software benefits from this indirectly these days.