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List:       gphoto-devel
Subject:    Re: [gphoto-devel] Re: Introduction and Comments
From:       Richard Stallman <rms () santafe ! edu>
Date:       2000-08-25 21:25:12
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Now that we have a free operating system, we need free applications to
go with it.  We should have free applications to do all the jobs that
users want to do.  Since this is a big job, we want to do all we can
to encourage developers to make their applications free.

To help the development of non-free applications would be working
directly against our own goal.  It would be shooting ourselves
systematically in each toe.

    if the non-Free applications
    want to provide that support, they would have to reimplement the Free
    drivers (resulting in a lot of wasted man-hours).

A non-free program is bait for people to give up their freedom and
accept shackles.  If our work is of no use to them, that's good!  If
that means they have to do extra work (because they can't use our
work), that's exactly what the GPL is supposed to achieve.  It says,
"Here's some useful code you can use IF you make your program free."
This is why some of the GNOME libraries are released under the GPL.

Some developers, when faced with this situation, decide to make their
applications free so that they can use our code.  Every time that
happens, the Free World gains a new application.  We win.

We can't win every time.  Some developers go ahead and make the
application non-free, and don't use our code.  When that happens, we
don't win, but we lose nothing.  Their code was going to be off-limits
to us in any case.

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