this post was submitted on 07 Oct 2023
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Linux
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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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GitHub has been recognized as harmful to the free software community at least as early as 2015, years before the Microsoft acquisition. See RMS email on GitHub.
There is more than enough freedom in GitHub to set a license as you see fit. Stallman is being obtuse.
GitHub allows you to select any license (including a proprietary license) or no license at all. This does not mean that GitHub encourages one to select a free software license or any license at all.
In 2014, John Sullivan, then Executive Director of FSF, also asserted that GitHub's choosealicense.com was anti-copyleft.
Anti-copyleft bias noted by Stallman and Sullivan is evident from the very beginning, from the founder Tom Preston-Werner himself. In 2011, Preston-Werner wrote that one should "open source (almost) everything" under a permissive license, because the GPL is "too dogmatic," but keep "anything that represents business value" proprietary.