Re: FreeBSD, Clang and GCC: Copyleft vs. Community

I recently received a comment via e-mail from a fellow GNU hacker Antonio
Diaz, who is the author and maintainer of [GNU Ocrad][0], a [free (as in
freedom)][1] optical character recognition (OCR) program. His comment was in
response to my article entitled [FreeBSD, Clang and GCC: Copyleft vs.
Community][2], which details the fundamental difference in philosophy
between free software and ``open source''.

I found Antonio's perspective to be enlightening, so I asked for his
permission to share it here.

  I imagine a world where all the Free Software is GPLed. The amount and
  usefulness of Free Software grows incesantly because free projects can
  reuse the code of previous free projects. Proprietary software is
  expensive because every company has to write most of its "products" from
  scratch. Most people use Free Software, and proprietary software is mainly
  used for specialized tasks for which no free replacement exists yet.

  Now I imagine a world where all the Free Software is really "open source"
  (BSD license). Free Software is restricted to the operating system and
  basic aplications because the license does not guarantee reciprocity.
  Proprietary software is cheap to produce because it is built using the
  code of free projects, but it is expensive for the user (in money and
  freedom) because there is no real competition from Free Software. Most
  people use proprietary software, as Free Software is too basic for most
  tasks.

  I think "open source" organizations (specially BSD) are wilfully
  destroying the long-term benefits for society of the GPL, and they are
  doing it for short-term benefits like popularity and greed:

  "As these companies devise strategies for dealing with GPLv3, so must the
  FreeBSD community - strategies that capitalize on this opportunity to
  increase adoption of FreeBSD." "Fundraising Update [...] This has
  increased the number of people actively approaching companies to make
  large contributions."

  https://www.freebsdfoundation.org/press/2007Aug-newsletter.shtml

  Human beings have an innate sense of justice. In absence of reciprocity
  one wants to be paid, but I think that reciprocity is much better for
  society in the long term.[3]

Antonio compels us to think toward the future: while developers releasing
their code under permissive licenses like the [Modified BSD License][4] are
still making a generous contribution to the free software community today,
it may eventually lead to negative consequences by empowering non-free
software tomorrow.

[0] https://www.gnu.org/software/ocrad/ocrad.html
[1] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
[2] [cref:288c90df6209cb9a698099f5fa8c6aed393ef20e]
[3] Comment by Antonio Diaz; the only modifications made were for
formatting.
[4] https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#ModifiedBSD