Fake Steve Loves Freetards
In a previous article Fake Steve Tees Off I covered some humorous-but-biting posts from Fake Steve Jobs, specifically regarding his disdain for open source extremists which he refers to as freetards.
Once again, he’s teed off, this time in a post titled Freetards Turn On Google which in turn is a response to a Wired article about some open source advocates finding Google’s Android as a sinister threat.
The whole point being made by Fake Steve is that there are people that call themselves open source advocates, but they sound a lot more like intolerant GPL extremists in that they actually consider other open source licenses a threat. Note the comments in the Fake Steve post, showing how far apart the two open source camps are.
That is the hypocrisy that caused this site to be launched in the first place.
The open source community should be excited that a company as big and powerful as Google has chosen to release their mobile platform on an open source license, regardless of the license chosen. Even if you don’t like the more free Apache license, you must accept the simple reality that this move provides even more incentive for the industry to shift toward an open source model for mobile platforms.
Here’s the money quote in the Wired article, from Jim Zemlin:
“Google is proliferating the use of the Linux kernel as the standard for mobile devices,” says Zemlin. “Similar to the server operating environment, the world will likely end up with two camps: Linux-based phones on one side with Microsoft and Symbian on the other. My guess is Microsoft and Symbian will continue to lag due to the lack of agility from their proprietary development models. It’s difficult for them to compete with open-source licenses, no matter which specific one.”
(Yeah the emphasis was mine.)
The Apache license gives the user the freedom to make whatever changes/enhancements to the software, and the freedom to decide how those are redistributed. If you disagree, please grab the nearest dictionary and look up the word freedom, and note the specific reference to freedom having a lack of restriction. :-)
Anywhoo, just thought it was bizarre that what is obviously a big win for open source gets panned by supposed open source advocates, and some even go as far as to say it is a threat despite being released by a license that is compatible with GPLv3 (see “GPL Compatibility” section at the end of the document for one explanation, many others found easily online).