Re: From Lua to Python?

[Russell Haley <russ.haley@...>]

On Sun, Jul 2, 2017 at 11:55 AM, Sean Conner <sean@conman.org> wrote:
> It was thus said that the Great Russell Haley once stated:
>>
>> As someone who also thought of himself as an 'Army of One' I can see
>> that without massive amounts of time and resources (i.e. a financial
>> backer), there is little hope to compete even in a small slice of a
>> market. I believe the GPL license is largely responsible for this, as
>> large companies can always pour more resources into a technology than
>> you have available. Then, they simply suck up your GPL'd IP and turn
>> it to their advantage. I disdain the GPL and all who toute it for this
>> reason.
>
>   The GPL, or open source in general.  Because in my experience, companies
> are shying away from GPL code like you wouldn't believe---Apple doesn't
> allow *any* GPL code on iOS and funded development of clang so they could
> remove the one last major GPLed component on their system---GCC.  The only
> program that is still GPLed on Android phones is the kernel, and that's only
> because Linux is GPL2 only (not GPL2+).

Android was Apache licensed last I looked. This is due to historic
reasons. The handset makers that Android targets would not accept a
GPL license due to the shenanigans of Nokia on the Symbian project in
the early 2000's. The bait and switch that the handset makers did NOT
see coming is the move of everything useful for Android into the
proprietary, closed sourced Google Apps application. AOSP is more or
less unusable unless you're a software developer. No license will
defend you against that kind of corporate maneuver.

As a FreeBSD user, I am very grateful for the clang\LLVM project. I
don't blame Apple for locking down their OS. I had once hoped to do
the same thing with FreeBSD in an embedded system (using Lua of
course!). This is also what Sony has done for the Playstation 3 & 4.
Both the Playstation and the new Nintendo is a closed version of
FreeBSD. I believe this to be rightful profitability due to
innovation.[1]

I'm referring more to the IBMs, Oracles and Tata consultancies of the
world. I have now seen two companies steam rolled because the original
authors used FOSS underpinnings and a larger consultancy rolls in and
just takes over the code because, well, it's GPL! I'm sure the
situation was more complex that I have acknowledged, but I no longer
trust the GPL. I'm really glad people want to share source code. I do
too, but I want control over what I share.

Russ

[1] Broken patent systems and abusive licensing agreements aside.


>   No, companies *hate* the GPL for the most part.  Companies *love* the more
> "permissive" [1] like MIT or BSD, because *then* they can take your IP and
> not give anything back [2].  Programmers like MIT and BSD for the exact same
> reason [3].
>
>   -spc (One more reason for companies to hate the GPL---it's user friendly [4])
>
> [1]     Permissive for programmers; they're actually quite user hostile
>         licenses in my opinion.
>
> [2]     Actually, they do tend to give back if the company thinks they can
>         get free maintainence and upgrades of the codebase and it's not
>         giving away too much in the way of competative advantage.
>
> [3]     And maybe hoping to become a large company in turn.
>
> [4]     In that it allows the user to see how the program works (and how
>         data is stored) and also fix and/or improve the program they're
>         using (or perhaps hire a programmer to do the work).
>