Comment by belorn
11 years ago
You are perfectly right regarding stallmas posted opinion regarding the GPL license.
I doubt however that RMS would be happy with open/free code being replaced by closed one as exemplified in the article. That has of course nothing to do with permissive and copyleft, and all to do with lock-in, proprietary practices, and project management.
He'd likely just say it was never fully free to begin with, because of the license. Not to mention, all the Google apps in question connect to SaaS backends which are closed anyway.
Personally, I don't see the problem with what Google is doing, I would prefer 100% open software myself, but Google would never open-source their services' code, so the fact the apps are closed-source doesn't really make a difference.