Re: enabling company-capf support in cfengine.el

[David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org>]

John Yates <john@yates-sheets.org> writes:

> On Sun, Jan 19, 2014 at 10:32 PM, Óscar Fuentes <ofv@wanadoo.es> wrote:
>
>> dragonegg is GPLed.
>
>
> Meaning it is above reproach.

Not really.  "reproach" is something concerning intent rather than
execution.  The GPL as a license is pretty good in being incompatible
mostly with intents interfering with the well-being of Free Software.
But it has no will of its own and it is a legal, not a moral tool.  The
world is always changing, and that also concerns the relation of the GPL
to the goals of Free Software which are of moral, not legal nature.
Realigning the effectiveness of the GPL regarding Free Software goals
under the restraints of developments in the real world already required
the large and cumbersome update from GPLv2 to GPLv3.

GPLed software is hard to use as a weapon against Free Software by
design, but even a blunt weapon can do harm.

> The crucial fact is that RMS delayed gcc implementation of useful,
> attractive functionality at a time when such was (or was becoming)
> available from clang / llvm.  Yet despite his stance he was unable to
> prevent gnu frontends from being integrated (in a perfectly legal way)
> with the BSD-licensed llvm backend.  The net effect was to further
> reduce gcc's attractiveness within the "open source compiler
> community".

The priorities of the GNU project are not focused about "market share".
The priorities are to make the best possible software available to those
who care about Free Software, and to not help with locking them into
offerings not providing the Software Freedoms the GNU project has set
out to preserve.

It's not surprising that watered-down versions of our goals and
principles enjoy a lot of success: as you can see with the kind of
unfreedoms democratically elected governments can get away with, there
is a lot of leeway before the general public gets annoyed enough to even
care.

Does that mean that we should stop caring, too?  Nobody can force us to
give up the little (and not so little) we can call our own.  Hindsight
is always a great thing to have.  And to be honest, I wish I'd be living
in a world where hindsight managed to prove Richard and his precautions
wrong more often.

-- 
David Kastrup