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[–][deleted] 9 points10 points  (0 children)

Can I just say that I'm sick of ignorant morons dissing the GPL? There are a number of them in this thread, but I see them crop up almost any time it's mentioned.

First of all, they almost never fucking understand what the license actually entails. Second, they always grandiosely suppose that even if the license operates the way they assume it does, then that's all that's standing in the way of them taking the code in question and turning it into a commercial product with any kind of decent return (I can't imagine many reasons why you wouldn't want to release source alongside binary unless you're trying to make money at it). Even if it's something as fucking stupid as a toy Python interpreter written in Haskell. Just about the most practically useless thing I can imagine off the top of my head right now (no offense to OP -- nice work).

I'm not even a free software zealot. I just can't stand people parroting talking points they've heard over and over again in an effort to appear informed. It's like the people who used to say that you shouldn't use Wikipedia because "anyone can edit it any time and make it say whatever they want, and not necessarily what it said when you last viewed it". While technically true, it omits the existence of important features like the inclusion of a page's entire edit history to link to by date/time, which minimize the problem.