Somebody in the thread at some point said: > His position is the same as mine that if the GPL stops you **utterly in > your tracks** from doing useful stuff, then the old-school "Right Thing" > principle kicks in. You look for a solution, any solution to get the job > done. Something is rotten in Denmark when the goal is being righteous as The GPL doesn't stop you combining stuff, it stops you distributing some combinations. That's a bit different. Proprietary licensed stuff is far worse, you can't redistribute it AT ALL or you get chucked in jail. This and his unwillingness to converge on any agreement different from his starting position is my problem with Les' complaints, despite I have seen him say a lot of smart things otherwise. Sometimes you have to use proprietary stuff to do what you need to do at all -- but it wasn't that long ago that 100% proprietary was the only choice. Now for a lot of us it is the unusual case at the edge on our PCs and even outside of PCs FOSS solutions are creeping into the other devices around us too. But choosing to use a proprietary solution as the enduser is different from changing the basis of a Free distro to include it. Whereas we individually might have to compromise to go on, the ideal shouldn't be compromised (he said, trying not to think about firmware exceptions). -Andy
