Conversation

@tyil OK, I thought I answered those questions. I'll try to make myself more clear.

1. What is the political message of this software? It is the same as all other GPL licensed software: that sharing code is a moral act, that sharing code and insisting that others share alike generally benefits the greater good of humanity. (And by the way, I agree, and I commend you for your choice of GPL license over MIT or BSD, I prefer GPL myself.)

2. What political value am I trying to get from the most recent commit [git.tyil.nl]? The political value you get from sharing that one commit is the same as value you get from every other commit to a GPL licensed software: you increase the amount of GPL licensed software in the world. If the GPL existed but no one used it, it would not have the same utility benefit it has to the people of the world now. But by using it and writing GPL software increases the number of people contributing to the moral collective of free software. It is like an act of protest against the idea of proprietary software and against the amoral rent seeking for code.

3. How am I furthering my political agenda with the subroutine config()? You further your agenda the same way every other commit to a GPL project does: engaging in the act of writing code and committing it to a GPL licensed program is exercising your political right to share code and to use shared code. And, like I said above, you also increase the amount of GPL code in the world, which furthers the GPL project as an act of protest against rent seeking for code.

But it is indeed very, very strange that you think there is nothing political in what you have done here. The GPL can only exist because of the legal system and the political decisions that construct the law around information property and copyright.