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It seems the powers got the timing right again. The latest draft of GPLv3 is out of the door, the anti-GPLv3 pieces start coming in.

Linspire’s Kevin Carmony got another call from his buddy Bill and he’s written this. Others join in, like William Hurley here. He quotes Apache’s (or Google’s?) Greg Stein: "Due to pressure from developers, all software is moving towards permissive licensing." Mr. Hurley adds that "[…]developers care about the licenses on the software they use and incorporate into their projects, they like permissive licenses, and they will increasingly demand permissive licenses."

Right, if I was a software engineer working for some company with non-free software being my business model, then that’s exactly what I’d be looking for. Take same BSD-style (bad term, I know) licensed code, make it non-free and there you’ll have "earned" another buck. And right, Google is T3H CH4MP10N of the Free Software Community, isn’t it? There are so many Free Software products published by them I can’t even remember the name of any single one of them. But of course, someone who works for Google must be so smart he’s always right, right?

Oh yes, I think every developer in the world will want that. How strange that even GPLv2 is so popular.  I wonder if folks like Carmony and Stein still live in the same world as we do. Linus Torvalds might not be p***ed about Tivo taking the Linux kernel and locking the hardware like they do, but I bet some of his co-developers are. Thousands of developers on this Earth have chosen the GPL because they want their Free Software to stay free. As long as so many players in the industry don’t start to play fair with other people’s software a big migration to more permissive licenses isn’t going to happen.

Yes, I want to see Free Software advance, but not by folks like Kevin Carmony, sellouts who give a crap about the community that provides them with the leverage they make their money with. Get your big paychecks from T3h Industry and leave us alone.