The GPL license clearly states that any and all code that includes or links to GPL code has to also be released as GPL. There is nothing to misinterpret there.
It's literally a license designed to prevent commercial programmers from including it in their commercial programs as much as humanly possible.
You know you can sell GPLed code, right? It's just that once you sell it, the buyer has the same rights you do. So you might want to sell that code for
$1 million or something. I don't know how often anyone has done this, or at what scale. But the idea of a big up front price for the code, such as with crowdfunding, is compatible with the GPL. A specific example I can think of where something like this actually happened, is Blender. Enough money was raised for the company that had made Blender, that they were willing to release it GPL. And now it has remained the one true 3D modeling and animation program of the Free Software ecosystem.
Cisco does not earn money from their programs though. They earn money from their hardware sales and support. They aren't programmers making money off programs.
That is entirely the point. It suits
their business model, to make money on hardware, not software. They are not unique in this: Apple is also selling hardware, much moreso than software. Google sells
advertizing, and is perfectly willing to undermine anyone who sells hardware
or software. These strategic, macroeconomic business models are all dukeing it out now, for global dominance.
In other words it only allows you to use the code if you use it as a closed exe,
Your thought process isn't clear here. The GPL
requires code to be open and modifiable. This is why various commercial endeavors won't use it, because it's not possible for them to make money with people freely copying the code. What if every game developer were required, in practice, to run a server and sell their game as a "software service", the way Richard M. Stallman thinks the world is supposed to work? Well that would make the barriers of entry way too high for the lone wolf indie, he or she would never survive in such a world. RMS, unwittingly or not, is saying if you don't have some big corporate team and a pile of capital to do all kinds of online support for services, you can go fudge yourself. Well fudge him. I appreciate what he's tried to do for software, but the history I've read is he's also an ass, with strong opinions about how things "should be" that don't hold water in the real world. Just talk to the XEmacs crowd about the guy, that was one of the big famous code forks.
The purpose of open source is to allow your solutions for problems to be used freely by others so that they can be built upon and improved for the betterment of all. It's a movement that wants to make the programming world a better place. And GPL does the opposite. It ensures that most programmers, the very people this move is supposed to help, can't use your code.
"Who gets the power" is not as straightforward as you claim. Consider the developer energy put into various BSD Unix distributions, for instance. They don't have even remotely the critical mass of Linux distros, despite being "correctly" licensed in our view. This is because of the reality of what constraints do or don't cause people to do. The GPL conditions programming labor in certain ways. It conditions corporate contracts in certain ways. The ecosystem of Linux
is objectively more successful than that of BSD.
Yet, Linux
sucks as a consumer OS. That ecosystem the GPL creates, has negative effects as well. They can't agree on anything! They dither endlessly about principles, and do nothing that profit oriented hardware providers want to hear about. Linus Torvaldis famously gave NVIDIA the middle finger a number of years ago. I don't know if that's gotten better, I haven't been checking lately. But there are these big battles about "how to do reality" where Linux is a big
loser. Clearly, GPL ideology gets in the way of some kinds of endeavors.
A lot of Linux is, culturally, wires and loose ends hanging out all over the place. It attracts techies who like that, who want to scrounge around in the muck. They think it's fun, they think it's all toys and amusing. They feel special understanding all this muck that other people don't understand. They usually have the industrial design sensibilities of a
complete turd. They wouldn't last a
day at Apple. These are generalizations, but broadly, they're true. I did 3 years of Linux recently, and I am a "hardcore" tech guy. I came to realize just how different my design sensibilities are from most of them. Most of those people are fully ok with things being
crap.
Strategically, I think it has a lot to do with Computer Science / Engineering people who didn't learn how to bang out 10 page papers back in college, the way we Liberal Arts types did. When people don't know how to communicate, it shows in their work.
You can have one without the other. They just naturally go really well together.
Find me any example of a regime in real human history, that was a police state, without also being fundamentalist and intolerant of other ideologies. I'm not talking about
Christian fundamentalists, I mean the general pattern of fundamentalist approach to ideology, writ large. The Nazis were obviously fundamentalists for instance. They make up a whole Germanic religion and mythos, and insisted that Jews etc. all had to die.
Yang and perhaps Deidra are the only ones I genuinely can't see not believing what they preach. And of the two Yang is the only one with a clear vision. As odd and alien as that vision is to us.
You might
think that, and unless I'd read a biography of Mao Tse-Tung, I'd agree with you. But I came to realize, with Mao at least,
it was all bullfeathers. He totally gaslit everyone. Everything he said was for
others to believe,
not for him to do. The
image of the leader, the persona, is not the same thing as
the leader.
He clearly understands economics to a frightening degree to be able to make such a statement.
No, he's just got a writer trying to make him sound impressive. There's no substance to this claim that "incrementalism can't work" at all. There is always an economic system, it's whatever people are exchanging as they interact with each other. Could be sex for a pack of cigarettes, not having much supply of those post-crash.
And he seems to be applying a very methodical approach to establishing a functioning economy to support a functioning society. In a different world I could see him creating a very effective command economy with those skills.
He's given a groovy line to characterize him as an "industrialist". That's not wrong, as a matter of character. But as a matter of
simulation, it's a lie. Morgan's whole world view is a lie. It is entirely self-serving so he can pursue wealth the way he wants to. There are 6 factions with other ideas about how to organize everything. Do you think Spartans won't manufacture rifles?
Indeed. The thing is as timeless as DOOM. The only thing it really lacks is various quality of life improvements that we've gotten used to over the years since it was out like easy mod support.
Yeah, lot of lessons learned on my part about how
not to write a game for modding.
Caviar 3D format, ugh!
).
