If it works well for them that's awesome, but that signup stinks of elitism for me. "You can't do some simple calculus? You must have nothing to add to the discussion."
"Those who chose other licenses, do so for reasons you should respect if you intend to benefit from their work." Of course. Authors are free to release software under whatever terms they like, and people who use the software are bound to abide by those terms. Let me be clear, I don't think that it's OK to violate the GPL. I was just saying that I don't really like the GPL.
I'm not saying it's OK to violate the terms of open source licenses, but the GPL has never fit with my idea of what Free Software should be like. I see Free Software as a gift given to the world as a whole, regardless of what they plan to do with it. Thus I see GNU and the FSF as terrible gift-givers.
Might get better results by making reference to science and glorifying Dawkins the savior as the reason for the season. The free thinkers are trained to gather around and financially support anything with Dawkins' name in it.
This effect is not an accident. It is the result of organized back-patting that happens all the time on the Internet
The fact that our current systems for giving semantic classifications to web content are insufficient does not mean that giving web content semantic meaning is a pointless idea.
It's like going back to the early 1980s and blogging about how computer graphics suck so you shouldn't be wasting your time looking into them.
No one will upvote anything anymore. They'll move their cursors to the up arrow and pause for a moment.
What if this is the one? What if this link is the buried landmine that will explode and destroy my perfect Hacker News karma score. I can see the headlines now: "Respected Hacker News User Clicks on Obvious Flamebait" Think of the scandal.
And then they'll move their mouse cursor away, pining for a HN where they can express their opinions about articles without worrying about what the group will think.
I support open source on a pragmatic level as a way for people to share code so that they no longer have to "re-invent the wheel". Because of this I feel like it's petty and counter-productive for the FSF to refuse to share their "free" software with people because of the way that those people want to use the software. Truly free software should be released to the public without limitations on how and where it should be used.
To clarify: I know that my preferred model ignores the scummy/greedy tendencies of people to leech off work that others have done. However, I'd like for people to think of open source software as a gift given with no strings attached.