Voilà un mail que j'ai écris en novembre 2003 concernant mon opinion sur les licenses logicielles.

 Steve wrote:
 > What are your thoughts on the matter?

 I see the "open source" and "free software" intiatives as a cultural movement
 that tends to make people who participate in it adhere to values that are
 rarely encouraged in the current social environment. 

 At first, people have to drop the idea of making big bucks with software in
 favor of letting everybody use and modify their software. People are encouraged
 to consider that sharing something with others is as (or even more) valuable
 as earning money by making others pay their share. Of course, it is possible
 to sell open source software, but this does not seem as the primary goal to
 me.  I think that people who do open source do not live to make money (aim at
 maximum profit, like any enterprise).

 People are also encouraged to communicate, collaborate and exchange ideas.
 Open source developers are encouraged to debate on subjects, and these
 subjects are open to everyone -- anyone interested can give his point of view,
 and directly or indirectly participate to the project advance. People are
 encouraged to be open minded and to listen to others. The important thing is
 also that this communication is once again not motivated by money.

 Money is not the exchanged value, knowledge is. Open source people experience
 that contributing something to the community is rewarding, not in cash, but
 in knowledge, new ideas and of course, source code. Instead of a certain 
 amount of money, you give something without expecting any return...  but
 there is eventually always a return.

 From an organisational point of view, the open source models prove that a
 decentralised organisation can succeed in building high quality software, even
 surpassing what big monolithic companies do. Moreover being decentralised
 render open source organisations very flexible and evolvable, whith a very
 high adaptation potential.

 Doing open source allows us to experience the value of free sharing, and the
 fact that money-driven exchange is not the best option for producing
 knowledge.  In this respect, I see the open source as a cultural revolution,
 that deeply changes the way people perceive the surrounding social
 environment.

 To get back to the software licenses, I like the fact that in the GPL has a
 rather "militant" point of view, trying to push people into the open source
 movement. I suppose that many people would have discovered the open source
 because they were forced by the GPL to do so.

 On the other hand, GPL is not as "free" as the BSD license, because it forces
 people to stay in open source. I generally like what is free (speech,
 thinking), and by free, I mean completely free -- without any restriction.
 This is obviously not the case for the GPL, which is why I would be in favour
 of the BSD license.

 The only thing that bugs me is that the BSD license would allow money-driven
 people to use what I wrote. In this sense, I would indirectly participate to
 something that I try to fight (egotistical people and corporations).

 So here lies my dilemna: to preserve complete freedom for my software (the BSD
 license), I must allow malevolent entities to use it as they want, and they
 may use it in a way that would hurt the freedom I am trying to promote.

 For instance, M$ is trying to get rid of open source and makes use of the
 BSD-licensed software (on their Rotor project) to realise its strategy. Of
 course, as I consider open source as culture I don't think that getting rid of
 open source is possible.

 For the moment, my projects are under the GPL license, but I wondered many
 times if I should not move to the BSD license. I am still not sure now.

 Regarding your "David vs Goliath" point of view on software development, I
 totally agree. I am currently employed in a big corporation, and simply
 witness everything falling apart, realising that 10-persons teams could be
 easily replaced by a couple of open minded people. It's not the people, it's
 the organisation and hierarchy that completely erodes the potential (and
 motivation) of people here.

 Cheers,

  -- Sébastien

Quelques mois plus tard (avril 2004), je me rend compte finalement que la license GPL a aussi fait quelques victimes. Il y a pas mal de projets où j'ai vu des gens se plaindre de RMS, voire l'évolution de projet se faire contraindre par la polique de la FSF.

C'est ce côté "militant" dont je parle plus haut, et il se trouve que bien que j'apprécie ce que dit RMS, en général, je n'apprécie pas trop les décisions qui sont prises dans certains cas par la FSF.

D'ailleurs, culturellement, et vu mon amour pour Python, je crois que je ne suis pas fondamentalement attiré par l'aspect militantiste de la GPL.