Does anyone know how this compares to Freenet? The FAQ talks about it a bit [ https://gnunet.org/faq/10 ] but for example, I don't understand what "Economics" means in this context?
With Freenet, you allocate storage, and content gets distributed throughout the network based on popularity. It's designed so that it is impossible to know what is in even your own store. Files must be "inserted". You can't really perform a search.
If GNUnet is like other file sharing, you share files while you are online, responding to searches and transferring files that are requested.
Yes. It is also worth mentioning that GNUnet is designed to be a secure framework, making it more than just the core of another P2P program. For instance it potentially might be used as the basis for other functions such as chat or VoIP without reinventing all of the low-level transport stuff. With GPL licensing it is likely to evolve as people imagine new enhancements.
Short and giving a clue as to function and freedom the name seems a good choice to me. The (GNU) GPL insures that the users and community will not be restricted from making their own fixes or enhancements. I think it is misleading when some refer to a permissive license as restrictive. You're given permission to do practically anything to the code for your own use, and basically have permission to distribute it to others too as long as you DON'T impose new restrictions on them.
Does anyone else feel repulsed by the name itself? Every time I see GNU something, I think "extreme ideology with an ugly name". Don't get me wrong, I'm grateful for what GNU did in the 80s and 90s, and I think it still has value (albeit, I think middle way approaches such as creative commons, MIT, Apache License, and others have won the popular geek mind for now). But IMHO, they need to rebrand.
When I see GNU I think of gsl, gcc, screen, emacs, lilypond, bash, and the core-utils which are all incredible pieces of software that I use every day. The FSF arguably might not always make the best decisions in how they represent themselves but GNU is a "brand" built on awesome free and open source software more than anything else. Additionally, the "extreme ideology" that you mention fits in pretty nicely with the purpose of this software so the name should be somewhat fitting if that's how you feel.
An extreme ideology I can understand, and approve of, others pursuing, even when I'm much more pragmatically inclined. They may not be right, but they're certainly not wrong either and that's worth fighting for.
I'd trust GNUnet over Freenet, simply because I 'know' the organisation behind it.
The right way to do things is not a popularity contest. Nor should it ever be. Nor should you put pressure on someone trying to do right via an appeal to popularity.
When success depends on gaining mindshare, branding and perception is important. A straight popularity contest is, indeed, not the right way to do things, but popularity is a factor.
I think you misunderstood canadaduane's point. There's no denying that a lot of popular open source software is not GPL these days.
Chromium, Rails, Ruby, Python, PHP, Riak, jQuery, SproutCore, basically everything from Apache and Mozilla including Firefox and CouchDB, etc.
There are exceptions like MySQL and MongoDB but they are exactly that, exceptions. Some of them are big ones such as Linux distros, I'm not saying there isn't a lot of existing GPL software out there today. I'd like to see license stats from BitBucket, Google Code, and Github.
There has always been a sizable minority of non-GPL open-source software, such as the BSD community. Not to mention groups like X11, zlib, Perl, and Python who invent their own license for some damned reason.
I haven't noticed any particular recent changes away from the GPL; for example, all of the major DVCS tools (Bazaar, Darcs, Git, Mercurial) use the GPL.
For what it's worth, I prefer to avoid non-GPL software. jQuery and Firefox are at least dual-licensed, so I don't mind using them, but I prefer to avoid Chromium (and especially Chrome) unless necessary.
There's no argument there. However I see more new projects that use MIT/BSD/Apache or similar than GPL. It could just be the projects I come across and/or are interested in, but I keep pretty broad tabs on technology and use various OSs on a daily basis. I suppose if you use Linux most of the time you will see a ton of GPL software relative to other licenses, but if you look at cross-platform and web stuff I see less GPL. Just my observation.
Look not at the status quo, look at the trends.
My non-scientific perception is also that new projects tend to use less restrictive licensing. And I like it.
Well, all current versions of (MRI) Ruby have a Ruby/GPL dual license. All versions starting from 1.9.3 will have a Ruby/BSDL license because of GPLv2/GPLv3 problems.
I see Microsoft (and probably some other companies) behind the decline of popularity of GPL. They invented the term "viral license" back in 2001. The reason why Microsoft is fighting against GPL while sponsoring non-copyleft open-source projects (Apache) is that GPL software is relatively immune to "Embrace, extend and extinguish" strategy, so they are trying to replace it with the kind of open-source they know how to deal with.
