esr on the gpl; esr on kde

just finished reading this interview with eric raymond. he's recently gone on a "the gpl is bad" tirade, completely missing the point and purpose of the gpl and how it was critical to the success of corporate adoption of open source software. the gpl, and licenses like it, have been the capitalist treaties that enable cooperation and sponsorship of open source software.

but i've come to expect this kind of tripe from esr. i remember back in january of 2004, when i was blogging elsewhere writing about how esr had proclaimed the demise of kde on the linux show. i vowed to remember and remind him of his utter failure at prognostication in years to come. well, i don't forget these things. here we are a year and a half out and kde has more direction than ever, more steam behind it than ever and a growing community of both contributors and users. so much for death and irrelevance, and so much for esr understanding our community. when we release kde 4 in another year and a half from now, perhaps we can revisit it.

back to the more recent esr interview, i did agree with some of the things he said, in particular:

Freedom is the oxygen of innovation, not its enemy.

when asked why, if open standards are good, people write open software to interoperate with proprietary standards, he said:

To support users who don't want their data to be trapped in proprietary applications under vendor control.

true. and i'd go one step further: if you create an open implementation of a vendor controlled standard that becomes popular enough, you can turn that proprietary standard into an open standard for all intents and purposes. samba would be my first exhibit in this case.

of course standards that start open and remain open are the best.