last I heard you were programming zope
Well that is not the only thing I program, if that makes any difference.
- why dont you stick to GPL'd software
Why should I do so? As far as I am concerned, Zope and Python are both released under free software licenses. The GPL is not the only free software license around. Here is something for you: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/license-list.html
has brought a huge amount of software to be available to the public, which would have never happened if the FOSS movement had been left in the hands of narrow-minded fanatics. The OSS movement started here:
Is it? I do not think so; and I do not trust you. Recently I heard some people give talks.
a. Dr. D.B. Phatak. Loves BSD; hates GPL. b. Someone from KreSit (forgot his name), who is close to 'a'. c. Chap from OSSRC, CDAC, Mumbai. d. Mathias Klang. Creative Commons Sweden, Lead
Person 'a' started off by expressing his hatred about GPL and expressed his love for BSD. He gave a nice presentation too. The presentation was in Windows.
Person 'b' spoke about the efforts of KreSit to promote Open Source, and he used MacOS, even after I personnally offered him a free alternative.
Person 'c' spoke about how CDAC is championing Open Source and writing a text to speech front-end for Pine. Why not Mutt? Pine is non-free, but I am not sure about the Open Sourceness of the thing. Hence I can not say anything. Even then. Why not Mutt? GNU did not write Mutt.
Person 'd' again went for his MacOS. Reason being OpenOffice.org could not render his presentation made in Powerpoint. The problem with Creative Commons is that its chief says Free Software and GPL has does not have the concept of copyright. That is nonsense. Isn't it?
Hence I can no more trust someone who champions Open Source and pretends to work for software freedom.
with attendance from people like Linus Torvalds (Linux kernel), Steve Allman (Sendmail), Guido von Rossum (Python), Eric Raymond (Fetchmail)
So what? FSF/GNU does recognise Linus Torvalds for the Linux kernel. The only problem is that he is not much bothered about sofware freedom. Did you hear the BitKeeper story?
Eric Raymond has his name in GNU's Who (http://www.gnu.org/people/people.html). He has had his share of appreciation too.
Why dont they stick the GPL'd stuff?
Why should they? The programs you mentioned are all Free Software.
So I suggest you guys stop persecuting scilab and concentrate on stating some policy on what you call 'web services' - all the proprietary software from google, yahoo et al which you are happily using because there is no fatwa from FSF in this regard.
Are you helping the drafting of GPLv3? Or are you just sitting and lecturing? Back when the GPL was written, Open Source did not even exist.
Why only 'web services'? What about Tivoisation? Are the Open Source champions doing something about it? Bruce Perens publicly urged the Linux kernel hackers to embrace GPLv3, and supported Stallman's view on this on lwn.net. Bruce Perens is the chap who wrote the Open Source Definition. In that same article he also stresses the need to start talking about software freedom once again. Where is Mr. Torvalds?
Regards, Debarshi