Chad Perrin wrote:
Idealism isn't an obstacle to me -- it's the wrong ideology. The things
I dislike about the GPL have nothing to do with commercializing things
as proprietary software, and everything to do with granting people the
right to distribute software freely. The GPL, in case you haven't
heard, has been used by the FSF as justification for threatening small
Linux distros with lawsuits if they don't devote significant resources
to maintaining, and making available, archives of software for several
years after the software in question has become obsolete by the
project's standards. According to the GPL, once you make a piece of GPL
software availabl to someone in binary form, even if only for a few
hours, you must then provide easy accessibility to the source for three
years thereafter -- and linking them upstream is not sufficient to suit
the FSF.
This is going to make a lot of would-be Linux distributors think twice
about creating and distributing a distribution. It will especially
affect smaller project would-be founders think twice.
I can't personally imagine why someone would want to be a "Linux
distributor". There are two major "for-profit" Linux distributors
already, Red Hat and Novell, three major community distributors,
Slackware, Debian and Gentoo, and lots of little splinters and hangers
on. If you're motivated by money, work for Red Hat or Novell or someone
who uses them. If you're motivated by community, contribute to Debian or
Gentoo or Slackware.
There are a lot of things not to like about the GPL and the FSF in
addition to the ones you mention. But even in the absence of potential
FSF lawsuits, there are lots more interesting and potentially profitable
problems to be solved within the context of existing distributions,
rather than creating a new one.
It made me think twice. I now won't ever be part of any GPL binary
distribution chain, ever -- which pretty much makes BitTorrent a
non-option for me as a means of getting Linux installer images, since
BitTorrent's value for that is negated when I'm not allowing uploads to
"give back" to the torrent availability. A distribution I was working
on has been canned. Et cetera.
I wasn't aware of the BitTorrent interpretation of this FSF policy. Has
someone actually been asked not to participate in BitTorrent exchange of
Linux install media by the FSF? I download Quantian, Gentoo, CentOS,
OpenSuse and occasionally other distro images all the time with BitTorrent.
Speaking of licensing, a couple of days ago I downloaded OpenSuse 10.1
and installed it. You ought to read the Novell EULA when you install it
-- I almost bailed out and probably won't use it, since it was quite a
bit slower than Gentoo anyhow. 
Oops ... one of the terms of the EULA
was that I not publish benchmarks.
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