Hidden War on GPL

General Tor and Anonymity Talk
#1

This is mini educational thread about how users and developers should be aware when dealing with evil megacorp companies:

GPL went into big enemies , and of course enemies like Microsoft :

“Free software,” like free societies, has its enemies. Microsoft has waged a war against the GPL, warning whoever will listen that the GPL is a “dangerous” license.

Reference: Free Software, Free Society (fsfs3) page 8

Also Dr.RMS mentioned that again in 2004:

Richard Stallman, Free Software Lecture, Australian National University, 2004

Apple another major enemy to GNU GPL:

Reclaim your freedom with free libre software now - Richard Stallman of Free Software Movement

Another enemy i want to add which is Google. Its common that Google using a GPL license software called Linux Kernel in their android products (Though John Sullivan, Executive Director of FSF in an Interview with Bryan Lunduke in 2017 said: “There are rumors about Google waning to change the kernel on android, There is another Google Kernel Project Fuchsia”

Reference: John Sullivan, Executive Director of the Free Software Foundation - Recorded at LinuxFest NW, 2017)

But we look at some of their folks what they request from others in google code:

googleenemy
googleenemy781×362 31.9 KB

Are you willing / would it be possible to allow me to use this project under a more developer friendly license like BSD / MIT instead of GPL?

Reference: https://github.com/josecl/cool-php-captcha/issues/31

and sadly look at that poor developer issued it as a defect. (good thing he didnt change his project license and left it as it is)

BSD,Apache,MIT…etc they have the common vulnerability which is anyone can take the code and close its source without benefiting the developer and/or the community. Which GPL has a good protection against that and/or any Copyleft license as well.

Good examples of evil companies used this method to its favor are:

This is just small scrape , if anyone have more evidences and willing to add it then thats will be great as well.

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#2

Android is a showcase for a masterpiece in circumventing the purpose of GPL. Due to locked bootloaders, for most phones, the community is unable to flash their own custom software. It’s a deleterious defeat. This could be a GPLv2 issue only and GPLv3 may not be affected. I don’t know. Problem is, linux kernel is only GPLv2.

I wouldn’t stress that point. Looks like that ticket was automatically migrated and then such oddities happen.

Also while a google bot might have automatically created that ticket, it says “original issue reported by …” which does not look like a google employee. GoogleCodeExporter (Google Code Exporter) · GitHub / https://code.google.com/export-to-github/ is just a tool that google provided to simplify migrating away from google code to github.

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#3

Thats Linux Issue , Not GPL because as you mentioned there is already GPLv3.

As we see here its mentioned as “Type-Enhancement”

https://github.com/josecl/cool-php-captcha/issues/14

So the bot will just copy/paste what been already marked in the original template (googlecode) without changing/editing it.