Free software movement gets down to business

Kelly McNeill writes “I’m a strong believer in the Free Software Movement. All software ought to be free software and distributed under the terms of the General Public License (GPL). There are solid ethical and engineering reasons to take that stance. I’m also a strong believer that growth-oriented, profitable, socially responsible businesses can be based on free software and do so without any need for proprietary or even open-source (non-GPL) components. The simplest argument in favor of this view is to recognize that proprietary software licenses are largely an accounting convenience rather than a necessary condition of how software-based businesses operate.”