Public Money - Public Code: Helping with the campaign

[hellekin]

On Sat, 26 Aug 2017 06:30:12 +0200
Moritz Bartl <moritz at headstrong.de> wrote:

> choices. For instance, a small country might want to take advantage of
> further improvements by others to its software and would be more
> inclined to fund open source projects with licenses that limit
> commercial utilization, such as the General Public License.
>

This argument needs to be killed once and for all. As long as it is
used by the enemies of freedom, it will be believed and taken into
account as a problem by institutions.

I don't know of a really good answer already formulated to dispel this
fallacy though, do you?

I would look at reformulating "commercial utilization" as what it is:
vendor-locking and anti-competitive behavior. The GPL limits
vendor-locking, and favors competition by providing an even playground
for all industrial actors regardless of their size and capacity to
produce code; considering public code as infrastructure, like language.
Nobody would argue that limiting access to language is a genuine
business practice (although promoters of 'intellectual property' would
certainly disagree.)

==
hk

-- 
hellekin <how at gnu.org>