But as to your point, not all free software licenses are copyleft. The MIT and BSD and Apache licenses are all proprietary-friendly licenses.
And as for requiring to extend the GNU/Linux ecosystem, I don't think that's true. It just looks like they've implemented syscall compatibility with Linux (something that FreeBSD has had for donkey's years and SmartOS has been working on for the past few years). Neither of those technologies resulted in more software specifically for GNU/Linux.
RMS was foresighted enough to make licensing a core part of open source. I have a deep respect for the man.
The Achilles heel for open source software remains to be patents. In that regard I think many proprietary players still have the upper hand.
> RMS was foresighted enough to make licensing a core part of open source. I have a deep respect for the man.
He founded the free software movement. The open source movement is based on different values (convenience above ethics) which Stallman doesn't agree with.
> The Achilles heel for open source software remains to be patents. In that regard I think many proprietary players still have the upper hand.
Both the GPLv3 and Apache solve this problem. The issue is that too many people are using permissive licenses where it's not appropriate.
I think he would say what he has always said about secret software. He's fairly consistent in that regard.
Ignoring your insults toward RMS, you can always send him an email at [email protected]. He responds within a few days most of the time.
You are mixing them all and that's how the debate gets stuck into some neckbeard-limbo that nobody cares about.
Society made a lot of progress when religion and state got decoupled from each other. There are some things that should be handled separately.
What I have to say about this is:
Technology-wise, GNU/Linux software is separate from that of Windows at the binary level as well as dependencies. For them to extend such software means that they would need to build on that. That would extend the GNU/Linux ecosystem.
Legally-wise, open source software is protected by open source licensing that requires derived software to also be licensed as open source. It is challenging to achieve the "extend" part of the "embrace/extend/extinguish" loop if open source licenses are in place.
In terms of values, they're a for-profit corporation trying to reach out to developers. Same as every other company. They have open sourced .NET, they've released some of their actually important software on Linux (SQL Server), they have embraced the Linux platform on their cloud environments... everything possible to appeal to developers. It doesn't appeal to me, though.