Copyleft licenses are not βrestrictiveβ
https://drewdevault.com/2024/04/19/2024-04-19-Copyleft-is-not-restrictive.html
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@drewdevault I cant tell you how many times people released their innovated idea under a copy-left license only to be angered when they realized the consequences, the vital nature, and the lock-in that resulted. Many abandoned the project and had to start over...
To each their own, but I will never use a copyleft license again.
@freemo oh no, it prevented you from making proprietary software, what a tragedy...
@drewdevault No, I didnt say anything about proprietary software. And it allows for that just fine.
@freemo that's literally the only thing that vitality prevents
I assume you mean "virality".. and no, it prevents quite a bit else.. for example it prevents switching or in some cases even using other copy-left licenses. It is also well known for not working well along side other open-source licenses in general.
There have been countless open-source projects that had to be abandoned and restarted from scratch due to the virality of a copyleft license that prevented progress regarding open-source interests due to licensing conflicts.
X.org server I think was the one that had to be abandoned, or was it XFree86.. one of the major X11 implementations had to be completely abandoned and rewritten as whatever replaced it.
In response to the poor license change, some developers forked a version before the change and made it into X.Org Server (only small changes were made after that version, so "completely abandoned and rewritten" to refer to rewriting small changes is completely wrong).
GPL/AGPL are for people who don't want their software to ever become part of an AWS/Azure offering or packaged commercially without code changes being released. But if you're writing a library in GPL (and it's not LGPL) don't expect anyone to use it. My current company has strict license checks as part of VC funding and we've removed and replaced parts of the code if it's discovered a dependent license is GPL (there's a CI check to prevent this now).
I have no real issue with anyone using GPL.. you are giving your time for free, put whatever rules on your contribution you want, im just happy your contributing.
But **I** will never contribute to a copyleft project, and I certainly never want to be limited with how I can use my own projects either. So I will certainly never support anything copyleft if ic an help it.
The vasy majority of my contributions are in no way proprietary and have no real use for me in a proprietary setting. Some other stuff does.
And yea, it is doing its job by cutting off developers from wanting to contribute to it, which is why copyleft has been dying out significantly in recent years and largely replaced with MIT and apache licenses.
The trend of GPL to isolate itself and push developers away by punishing the very people who release under it is exactly why its dying.
I have little interest in contributing to a project that won't defend the freedom of my work, so I have contributed to copylefted projects, but never to pushover-licensed ones.
>I certainly never want to be limited with how I can use my own projects either.
I suggest never using other developers libraries and writing everything yourself, if you feel like you're limited by not holding all of the copyright.
>which is why copyleft has been dying out significantly in recent years and largely replaced with MIT and apache licenses.
The fact is it hasn't - there exists more copylefted software now then in the past and freedom is being defended better than ever before.
Yes, microsoft and others have tricked many new developers into doing gratis work for them and their buddies, by making it seem that MIT expat and Apache 2.0 has "largely replaced" freedom-defending licenses, so more and more people make the mistake of using those licenses.
If they could, microsoft would make it that you couldn't even select say the GPLv3 as the license on github, but instead they've settled for making it ambiguous if a project is GPLv3-only or GPLv3-or-later (proven to be intentional as they refused to accept commits correcting this issue).
>The trend of GPL to isolate itself and push developers away by punishing the very people who release under it is exactly why its dying.
In reality, the floating island of freedom is bolstering itself slowly but surely with only high-quality developers, rather than welcoming low-quality ones, who will turn around and make the software proprietary.
You do you.. most developers prefer apache license these days, im one.. you dont, and are in a minority, thats your right.
Source?
I see that Apache 2.0 may be the most preferred license on github and other proprietary code hosts, but those aren't the only places to host software.
>are in a minority
Yes, freedom enjoyers have always been a minority, but just look how much has been done.