Re: [libreplanet-discuss] Dealing with blind hatred for the GPL

[Yui Hirasawa]

> Many people (especially in the open source community) hate the GPL more
> than they hate proprietary software, especially the GPLv3. I never found
> an approach that works with those people.

I find BSD people to be the loudest about this. The "open source" people
don't seem to give two shits as long as they can see the source in my
experience.

> Mention "freedom" and they'll say the GPL is "restrictive" and "viral".

Many people who think that are anarchist who also think they should be
allowed to kill.

> Mention practical advantages and they'll say "corporations don't touch
> anything GPL".

Those people are simply wrong. Many companies use and contribute to GPL
licensed software.

> Mention the dangers of proprietary software and they'll say it doesn't
> matter if the program in question is practically better.

You won't convince these people to think that freedom is important. They
only care about usability and sometimes about cost. It is a shame that
some people think that malware can be better in any way.

> Mention existing famous GPL projects and they'll argue that some of them
> didn't switch to GPLv3 (like Linux and Blender).

Most of those people don't even know the differences between GPLv2 and
GPLv3 or why some changes vere made. They only know about GPLv3 being
longer and reject it based on that. These are often people who use
X11/Expat or BSD licenses just because they are short and easy to
understand. They don't care about freedom. Making their own life easy is
all that's important to them.

> Actually, mentioning the GPL at all will get you covered with insults
> and accusations of zealotry.

It is always a bit funny when zealots call others that.

> Showing them articles from GNU.org doesn't work, and will only result in
> ad hominem attacks against their author, Richard Stallman.

Very rarely do they bother to even read those articles.

> This reminds me of Two Minutes Hate from 1984.
>
> How to reason with those people? They tend to gang up and it's very hard
> to get your point across when everybody is agreeing with one another on
> how stupid and brainwashed you are!

You can't reason with people who only care about their own life and not
about helping the humanity. I would recommend not going to the channels
and talking about it publicly but trying to spot the less brainwashed
individuals and talk to them in private and after you have gotten a few
of them on your side you could possibly try to bring it up on the
channel.