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Originally posted by RealNC
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bash, ar, gcc, g++, ar, cpp, ld, nm, as, ranlib, objcopy, readelf, libiberty.{a,so}, libc.so.*, libgcc_s.so.*, libstdc++.so.*.
Have fun getting a decently-running distro going with clang, newlib and ksh. Most stuff doesn't even compile with clang, and even if it did, glibc-specific behavior is relied upon quite extensively in many programs. Not to mention all the bash-specific system administration scripts that constitute the convenience of popular distros such as Ubuntu, Fedora, OpenSUSE and Gentoo...
Seriously, incendiary comments like this are completely counterproductive. If we take you literally, you look like an idiot. If you take yourself literally, you have a non-working system with a small subset of all the FOSS programs operating correctly (not to speak of proprietary programs) -- have fun with that. And if you were just making hyperbole, while in fact being fine with using GNU software, you still look like an idiot: if you care this little about what GNU has done (and why GNU has done), you are essentially putting all your faith in the current state of GNU software. If all maintenance on GNU software stopped today, and all developers who contribute to GNU who believe in freedom suddenly stopped contributing, the future of all those programs would be in jeopardy. Bitrot would take its toll, and these programs would end up in a very poor state as other software evolved around them. Is that what you want?
The development of free software (or open source, or "software I can take from others without paying them anything", or whatever you want to call it) depends crucially upon a positive feedback loop: share, contribute, use, repeat ad infinitum. The only thing preventing the entire ecosystem from becoming proprietarized in a short and tidy corporate coup is the fact that people value freedom and/or the availability of source code, which is at the very crux of both the Free Software and the Open Source movements. People who release software under licenses that help ensure that the source code and essential freedoms are preserved in perpetuity, are doing so because they want the positive feedback loop of progress to continue.
I don't know what you call the philosophy of "I like software that is awesome and I don't care about freedom or the availability of source code", but that is not the philosophy of any Linux kernel maintainer I know of, not to speak of other FOSS projects. That statement is neither in support of Free Software, nor Open Source. Andrew Morton is pretty stalwartly a Free Software guy; Linus Torvalds is pretty much an Open Source guy. Both of them value the perpetual availability of source code, not "just" awesome software. So don't put into the mouths of the kernel maintainers something that they do not profess, just because that happens to be your viewpoint.
BTW, think on this for a while: a developer contributing to a FOSS project who does not value the perpetual availability of source code on any level is absurd. If they don't value it, why are they contributing their code in the open? Because the license of the software legally forces them to release their changes? So they are so ethically destitute that they will just blindly abide by the license of the software that someone else decided for them, without considering whether they agree with it or not? I don't buy it.
And no, don't talk about employees of companies who hate FOSS but contribute to Linux anyway because they get paid. The company, who is the real operating agent here, cares about either freedom or open source -- otherwise they wouldn't be contributing to an open source kernel.
You could say that the company is self-interested and just wants to make profits today, but this is just a present vs future argument. Of course they want to make money right now, but they know that the open source ecosystem helps them make money into the future as well. If they thought otherwise, they could (and probably would) use a proprietary OS. A major investment such as hiring engineers to work on the Linux kernel requires significant corporate planning and research into future prospects; they wouldn't just make this decision on a whim. And in their estimation, they must have determined somehow that their profits will be higher if they invest in open source than if they go with a proprietary alternative. Otherwise they would have been financially motivated to go with the proprietary alternative.
So I've taken us from valuing freedom, all the way through companies contributing to open source because it is economically lucrative for them. But regardless of whether you are Richard Stallman, Linus Torvalds, or an Oracle Linux engineer, there is a common theme and assertion being made: we care that everyone's shared source code, our community body of work on "Linux", is available today, tonight, tomorrow, next year, and in 5 years. And we would be very upset if a large portion of new work on Linux, hugely beneficial to everyone, were written under a proprietary license. So we value the perpetual availability of the source : not just right at this instant, but into the future as well.
But wait, what would prevent someone from doing precisely what I just said? That is, what prevents $FOO_CORP from writing some massive enhancements to the Linux kernel, beneficial to everyone, and not sharing them with anyone but their paying customers (who get a binary blob)?
Well, unless you're talking specifically about the proprietary video drivers (which are perhaps a real-life instance of this example), the answer is "the GPL". So you can see how everyone who put their trust in the ecosystem, that any major new enhancements to come down the pipe would be shared, has thus been cheated by the proprietary drivers: everyone from the freedom-believer, all the way down to the economist at Fujitsu, has been cheated. Because they all expected that this work would be open source, just like the rest of Linux.
And how is it that they were cheated? Because, arguably, the GPL has a loophole that permits (or does it?) the proprietary blobs to be written. If indeed such loophole exists and is defensible in court (which has not actually been tried), this is unfortunate for everyone, because all stakeholders involved are not getting what they expected. The license is supposed to protect us from this. It didn't. It's a mistake, an aberration, an exploit, or maybe what they're doing with the binary blobs is actually unlawful -- call it what you like.
The reason people say "if you don't value freedom then use Windows" is because, well, using GNU or Linux (or GNU + Linux) directly implies that you value one or more of the following:
(a) freedom in and of itself,
(b) the availability of source code in and of itself,
(c) the quality of software products produced by a healthy FOSS ecosystem composed of developers who value either (a) or (b).
Even if you value (c), you must indirectly value either (a) or (b) by causation: because what caused all this great FOSS to be written? Was it... cosmic rays? An asteroid? A lot of bored people? No -- it was people who very purposefully evaluated either ethical or financial aspects of either free or open source software, and determined that they want to spend their time contributing to this positive feedback loop of progress.
So if you don't, in fact, value the very engine (or ecosystem, or feedback loop) that enables the creation of this software, then you are basically a nearsighted fool. By "not valuing it", that means you basically wouldn't care if the entire ecosystem dropped off the face of the earth tomorrow. And what would remain would be whatever software you currently have downloaded onto your PC, and nothing more. And you'd be perfectly fine with maintaining and enhancing this software yourself, in complete absence of the ecosystem that originally produced it. And I don't think that anyone is so foolish as to actually hold this viewpoint, except perhaps the few people who understand every last subsystem of Linux and actually could maintain the whole thing alone (albeit at a much slower pace!)
I'm not exclusively in "the free software camp", nor am I just an "open source advocate". But there are commonalities and pragmatic agreements of fact between both movements. I have attempted to pull out these commonalities and show how they are the very genesis of not just GNU, but all software released under a free or open source license, your precious Linux included. If you don't care what will happen to your software tomorrow or next month, then I dunno -- maybe you're a terminal cancer patient just looking for a few last laughs before you pass on? Because most humans look into the future with concern about what may come to pass. And without the free and open ecosystem, and the principles that underlie it, none of this would be possible.
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