@swashberry Again, thanks having the conversation. You didn't exactly answer my question, which was:

"Can you explain why copyleft, i.e. #GPLv3, #LGPLv3, & #AGPLv3, is fundamentally flawed for securing the freedoms described in the GPL text?"

It sounds like you have problems with copyright in general, and you believe that using copyrights for anything is against your concept of freedom, which you didn't define.

The GPL text defines 4 freedoms, which I've reproduced here:

"When we speak of free software, we are referring to freedom, not price. Our General Public Licenses are designed to make sure that you have the freedom to distribute copies of free software (and charge for them if you wish), that you receive source code or can get it if you want it, that you can change the software or use pieces of it in new free programs, and that you know you can do these things."

You've seemed to confuse the concept of "user" with "developer". The user of the software is not necessarily the developer, or the person who could potentially make money from selling proprietary software. Instead of relying on benevolent donations of free software, the GPL legally enforces the rights of users, in the sense of the people who actually use the program, not those who might sell the program to users who can afford to pay for it.

The GPL makes sure that the users who learn to use one version of a piece of software won't wake up and need to buy the next version, which is suddenly proprietary. It protects the users in perpetuity, using the law.

It sounds like your reasoning might be general enough to be extended to laws in general. Your argument sounds analogous to someone who doesn't like capitalism so they want to get rid of money. To be anti-capitalist, doesn't mean you need to get rid of money. You just charge progressive taxes that distribute the money more equally.

Copyrights (and money) are legal tools that we can use to build a more equitable democracy based on distributed free and open source software. #floss #democracy #gpl #gplv3 #lgplv3 #agplv3

@swashberry Can I first say that it is a real pleasure for me to speak with someone about the topic of the intersection of #foss and politics. It is also my understanding that Stallman is not anarchist. I find anarchy to have very few precepts to which one could agree. I don't know much about anarchy, but from what I've learned, there are no hard and fast rules beyond a sort of introspection on the existing structure of power, which reminds me of Critical Theory, which sounds rational. I'm not saying all anarchy is rational, but critical theory, critiquing the system of power seems rational. I like your distinction between socialist and communist. I understand that tax-based socialism in a regulated market makes sense, and what I understand of Leninist-communism, it fails because it puts all power into a government class, which fails to implement democracy. I like your comment about how basing a system of freedom on copyright is fundamentally flawed. Can you explain why copyleft, i.e. #GPLv3, #LGPLv3, & #AGPLv3, is fundamentally flawed for securing the freedoms described in the GPL text?

@fsfe As statically linked languages like #Go #Rust and #Nim are becoming more popular, many authors are adopting weak licenses for libraries also due to the limitations around static linking in #LGPLv3. Is there any ongoing discussion around standardizing a LGPLv3-with-static-linking-exception license? Hopefully with a shorter name 🙂. Thanks!

#GMP is a #freelibrary for arbitrary precision arithmetic, operating on signed integers, rational numbers, and floating-point numbers. There is no practical limit to the precision except the ones implied by the available memory in the machine GMP runs on.

The main target applications for GMP are #cryptography applications and #research , #algebra systems, #computational algebra research, etc.

GMP is distributed under the dual licenses, #GNU #LGPLv3 and #GNUGPL v2.

https://gmplib.org/

@xj9

Ehm... no.

Usually forks are backwards compatible at the instant they are forked. So people using version 3 of X will be able to use version 0 of X' if X' is a fork of X.

Even if the GPL text was on a free license (and it's not), any project adopting GPLv3+ right now could NOT migrate to the "Stubborn Public Licence" that is a fork of it.

And no code under SPL could be linked to GPLv3+ code.

That's why it's so important to consider, for people using #GPLv3+ or #AGPLv3+ or #LGPLv3+ if they still trust #FSF!

Because if not, they should move to a GPLv3-only or whatever, before GPLv4 is out.

@grainloom