A lot of people don't care about poor quality software either, as long as it does what they want. That doesn't mean people shouldn't raise the issue or criticise bad software.

The GPL is an atrocious license, it is the EULA of the FOSS world. The BSD license and its siblings are about as liberal a license as you can get, without something being in the public domain.

That is pure FUD, the GnuGPL does nothing but grant privileges and there is absolutely no onus to accept it if all you want to do is use the software, even modify it and use it yourself, turn it into poetry, whatever. The only time you have to accept the GPL is if you want a grant to make additional copies and the rights to distribute said copies. Said right is usually reserved to the copyright holders, however GPL developers are happy to pass along this right so long as you're willing to do the same.

Calling the GPL a "EULA" is either a terribly poor understanding of it or an outright lie.

Usage outside of the scope of the license is irrelevant. For the purposes that the GPL covers, it is overcomplicated, and unnecessarily restrictive, sounds like an EULA to me. The scope of what they cover is different, but how they are structured is the same. The relationship is metaphorical.

Now lets not digress too far from the topic at hand, DRM.

They're both legal documents, which tend to be complicated.

Now compare the GPL (any version) to the BSD license (any version), or the MIT license, or the ISC license, or any other permissive free software license.

Ah, now the truth comes out. You don't like the GPL, which is fine. However, calling it a EULA (as in End User License Agreement) is an outright lie, it imposes zero obligations on the end user and a EULA's entire purpose to to define the end user's relationship to the software (usually by imposing numerous restrictions).

The GPL imposes obligations on people who wish to be granted the ability to modify and redistribute the software JUST LIKE THE BSD AND APACHE LICENSES, and indeed all other OSS licenses that are in popular use.

It's not complicated, though, it's written in pretty simple language, the only real comparison to the BSD or Apache licenses is "It's longer", because the language is no more complex, here they are:
v2: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-2.0.html (down to the END OF TERMS AND CONDITIONS)
v3: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html (much longer, but down to the same clause, END OF TERMS AND CONDITIONS).

I'm sorry, but you'd have to be illiterate to not be able to read that and if you have questions, note the huge sections, readily available, such as "How to Apply These Terms to Your New Programs", the FAQs, quick guides, etc.

If you're smart enough to actually develop software you're way more clever than is required to figure this out, and should you be too lazy to do so most folks in the community are happy to politely explain your obligations, should you have any at all.
The only valid comparison is that you seem to prefer shorter licenses, there's no difference in the complexity of the language. And yes, we know, you don't like the obligations imposed by the GPL, that's fine, don't incorporate GPL code into code that intend to redistribute.

It was a metaphor.

In the case of the GPL, those obligations are unnecessarily restrictive.

The difference between permissive free software licenses and copyleft licenses is non-trivial.

The complexity arises from the restrictions it applies, and the superfluous clauses that present the terms of the license and affect the source code it is applied to, not the language it is written in.

Nobody said anything about the complexity of the language, we're discussing the complexity of the license (see above).

Now, given your obvious motivation for engaging in this particular discussion, and the fact that the discussion has gone way off topic, I will not be discussing this any further with you in this thread. We've digressed enough.

Because when you throw statements out like "The GPL is an atrocious license, it is the EULA of the FOSS world. The BSD license and its siblings are about as liberal a license as you can get, without something being in the public domain. " it doesn't come across as metaphorical, it comes across as FUD and misleading information in a realm where people don't need any more confusion. It took me calling you on it before you ever mentioned the word "metaphor".

Copyleft is not complicated, if the additional restriction of passing on the same courtesy is undesirable for you that's fine, but saying complying with copyleft by throwing your code changes up in a Github or Google Code repo is difficult is a non-starter, years ago this did necessitate some work or cost, but no longer (and if the cost was too much in years gone by there were and still remain other ways to handle it). Many libraries use the LGPL, which you're probably already aware won't make you open source your own modules (provided you can manage to not bake them right into the LGPLed library itself, which is not exactly hard).

The difference between copyleft and permissive licenses is one of philosophy. I maintain it's disingenuous to imply either one is onerous. If you cannot comply with a license, don't redistribute the modified code. Thanks for the dictionary.com link, but that doesn't really explain why you think complying with copyleft is complex. You seem to understand it just fine, you just don't really want to do it, which is fine, but if you're casting aspersions upon it maybe you could explain just why you think it's so horrible. How has copyleft harmed you, taken food off your plate, robbed you of anything at all?

Because I'm here to rightly proclaim, you can thank copyleft for a large portion of what we call the internet today. You can thank it for a lot of the software your teller uses to bank, that your doctor uses, that your government uses, etc. I could go on for ages, but you get the idea.

And don't get me wrong, I think BSD and Apache style licenses are just fine as well. Release your code under whatever license you think suits it, but if you want your code to stand on the shoulders of copyleft, sure, your code has got to join the club.

Yup. I'm not justifying one way or another. Just pointing out that not everyone has the same concerns, and that may come down to whether or not one's experience is altered by the DRM.

It seems to me that I find that all "new" converts to the hating DRM thing have actually done just that, run head on into some DRM BS and it's turned them off the whole thing. It seems anyone who's been against DRM for years were more of the instinctively repelled folks who were close enough to the whole situation, for whatever reason, that they considered the idea and rejected it (surely some considered it and accepted it, too).

It's all anecdotal, as far as the above goes, of course.

If I were to go solely from my own anecdotal evidence, I'd have to say that at a practical level it isn't that bad. But my perception comes from not facing the newer schemes that are seen in some current titles - I simply haven't bought any new titles for quite a while. The "worst" I've encountered is the need for a disk in the drive, and that was often because the title left a lot of data on the disk instead of installing it to the hard drive (Baldur's Gate, for instance). Likewise, if a buyer has a solid internet connection then he may see no problems with an always-on DRM scheme.

And that's why I made the initial glib comment about the "cool kids" hating it. I mean, if I said I hated DRM and someone asked why, I'd have to come back with, "Uhh, because?" In theory it sucks, but from the practical standpoint of my own personal experience with the particular titles I've bought, it has been, at worst, a very mild and very temporary annoyance. I guess that puts me in the 'acceptance' camp you mention, but that also might change in an instant if I were to buy a new title with one of the crappier DRM mechanisms. And even then, I'd be hard-pressed to generate ire for all types of DRM.

That said, I do understand why there is disgust with some of the current schemes.

Fine I'll bite.

Generally when I make metaphorical statements, I don't state that they are metaphors until it is obvious that somebody took it too literally. To me, "it is the EULA of the FOSS world" is quite obviously a metaphor. I never stated that it was. I stated that the GPL is an overcomplicated license, it has unnecessary complexity in the rules that it applies.

No, the difference is how much restriction is applied. Which you prefer is a matter of philosophy.

The GPL is onerous by the nature of the restrictions it applies.

I don't use (L)GPLed code in any projects I work on, and have no intention or need for doing so. Like much of what is produced by the GNU, code written by people who use the GPL to license their code tends to be of poor quality, and unsurprisingly full of unnecessary complexity. In case you hadn't figured it out yet, I'm a fan of the KISS principle, and I very much interpret the lass 'S' to stand for stupid.

Part of the restrictions applied by the GPL is on what GPLed code can be attached to. For example, GPL licensed code can not be distributed with code licensed with certain versions of the BSD license, or any proprietary code. I'm not talking about derivative code here, I'm talking about separate code that constitutes a part of a larger program.

How does that affect me? It doesn't. What drove the last nail in the coffin for the GPL for me, was when the GPL was used to effectively kill a project that created Linux LiveCDs to allow people to test and experience 'desktop composition'. The project was a simple project that packaged Gentoo Linux, with a pre-built desktop environment with composition enabled, and nVidia & ATi's own accelerated drivers, on a LiveCD. The person behind the project was told he could not distribute Linux LiveCDs with nVidia or ATi drivers because the drivers contained proprietary code and this violated the GPL. This wasn't a project that was stealing GPL licensed source code, or using GPL licensed source code for profit. It was a project that intended to show people the power of Linux, and the advanced features that were being developed for the desktop environment, and it was effectively shut down because the author did not want to violate the GPL. Had the Linux kernel been licensed in a more permissive license, this issue would have never existed.

The GPL has nothing to do with promoting freedom, it is simply Richard Stallman's anti-thesis to proprietary software, and like its proprietary counterparts, it has enough restrictions to enable abuse.

Don't confuse copyleft with UNIX, or UNIX with copyleft, or copyleft with open source, or open source with copyleft. Open source UNIX and UNIX like operating systems and software would exist and have existed without the copyleft movement. UNIX would also exist without open source. I can thank UNIX for a large portion of what we call the internet today, and much of the technology we reply on today, and I can thank Bell Labs for UNIX, and the multitude of contributors for software that runs on *nix platforms.

Standing on the shoulders of GPL licensed code, would be akin to standing at the bottom of a bottomless pit. None of my code will ever be derived from, or rely upon GPLed code, any more than I will ever create a game with DRM, or release software with an EULA.

Now stop reaffirming the pompous attitude that the GNU community so famously reeks of, and lets get back to discussing DRM.

Given that the vast majority of all code lacks quality, including stuff that doesn't include any GPLed code, and given that there's plenty of high quality GPL projects I'm not sure why it follows that the GPL causes poor quality code. That seems like a case of confirmation bias to me. Lots of code is absolute shit, it sounds like you code a lot, I'm sure you're no stranger to said aggravation.

I didn't say you did or even should. My statement applied to all FOSS licenses, if one cannot comply one simply shouldn't use it. When I previously used the term "you" I meant the inclusive "you" (seriously, fuck the English language for this ambiguity) and not you, personally. I've restated it with "one" instead of "you" to be more clear.
Ah, finally a good reason. You were trying to do something cool/good and I can see how that would be terribly frustrating. Yes, at this level you have to know quite a bit about how the Linux kernel operates and how drivers get used to properly comply with the GPL. Here's kind of a gold standard for beginning to understand this (if you even want to, or for others that do): http://kerneltrap.org/node/1735

Having said that there are various ways to get around this and to be clear, a program interacting with Linux or other GPLed code using normal, system calls (or via pipes, sockets, exposed services, etc.) is NOT a derived work. However if a non-compatibly licensed component somehow operates in the same executable (compiled into one program) it is. If it runs in the same memory space it may or may not be, with a strong dose of "probably", though some kernel modules are so ignorant of anything to with Linux that they are not considered a derivative work.

All of this is fairly confusing and, frankly, is about the worst the GPL has been able to serve up over the years, (imo at least). However, deploying an application on Linux doesn't make it a derivative work and many people do that every day without having any huge headaches. People writing applications that are so low level that they are "intertwined" with the kernel clearly are, and since they're benefiting, should they wish to redistribute, should consider themselves beholden to the terms of the GPL.

But to put it in perspective, you didn't get screwed just because you were using the GPL, you got screwed because you were using the GPL and incompatible licenses, you didn't create either of these core components and you're pretty much stuck adhering to the licenses of their respective copyright holders at that point.

Don't get me wrong, I'd trade the GPL in a heartbeat for the complete abolition of all copyright. In the meantime, the GPL is a good compromise.
It has everything to do with freedom, you're simply valuing the freedom of the individual over the freedom of everyone. That's only one kind of freedom in software. The GPL isn't as concerned with making sure any individual can do whatever they want, its concerned with maintaining the maximum amount of freedom possible for everyone involved and that is tricky indeed. How do you maintain the same freedom for downstream users when upstream users are free to benefit while locking everyone out of of it.

At any rate, not all my projects are GPLed (most are Apache-style) but I'm still glad for the GPL, we wouldn't have nearly the toys and great stuff we have today with the culture it fostered. Yeah, growing pains and some dickheads, you'd have to be dense to argue otherwise, to me it was well worth it and will likely continue to be so for a long time to come.
Oh come on, other *nix did exist but the work the galvanized the structure of the internet for the past 2 decades has been overwhelmingly GPL based. It's mere mental masturbation to debate whether BSD licensed stuff (or any other licensed stuff) would have stepped up to the plate without it. We simply don't know. We do know that the GPL did galvanize those folks into action and it did provide the overwhelming majority of what we see today.

Pretty much that. There are a lot of things we're supposed to feel "outraged" about but, truth be told, a whole bunch of us aren't really feeling the negative effects. That doesn't make it right or wrong, but simply that I find it difficult to get all bent out of shape with some of these issues, DRM being one of them. With other issues, which also don't affect me on a practical level, I will get all bent out of shape.

Your first paragraph describes perfectly what I had written earlier: that there is a difference between theory and practice. Theoretically DRM totally blows chunks. In practice, it blows chunks for some while others aren't at all bothered by it because the intrusion is minimal. We can apply that to almost every big change or policy, be it business, gummint, or personal.

WRT DRM, each person will have their own threshold for tolerance; mine is somewhere in the middle, where I'll put up with a key-check at the time of installation but I'll avoid titles that go beyond that.