Anarchism and the GPL

2007-08-16

I was reading some old Debian posts where there was an argument brewing regarding the existence of anarchy within Debian. A notable point raised was that the existence of the GPL, the leading FLOSS licence, would be impossible because a licence's existence requires laws to exist. The argument was that, since anarchy is against law (due to the idea that law is designed to defend the elites and oppress the majority), then there can't be free software.

What's notable about the argument is that it's pretty dumb. Now since anarchy ain't mainstream, it seems okay to use the current system to enforce some form of anarchy by law (use what little you have). GPL creator himself states that free software (subset of FLOSS) existed in MIT without requiring licences and then states that it's companies which refused open access to code, forcing GPL creator (Richard Stallman) to start a project to develop a truly free Operating System. In an anarchistic society, there certainly seems to be no motivation to develop non-FLOSS, but in today's rogue society, there's plenty.