@xj9

You are ignoring time into your reasoning.

If you code for a small élite (which is totally fine, even if such élite has a cardinality of one), the probability that what you build is going to attract economical and political interest is actually low.

In such case, public domain is as good as copyleft, since you only care about the few people you are coding for and, if a venture capital turn your tool into an oppressive proprietary spyware for everybody else, your small élite can still use the public domain software you coded.

BUT, if you are hoping to free more than a couple of persons, if you aim for a wider reach, releasing code in the public domain is exactly working for free for those you want to beat.

You are taking the risks.
You are doing the hard part of Research and Development.

And what's worse, you are building a new well defined market for them to enter.

If you build something that, even for a small period of time, have a chance to succeed, by releasing as public domain you are just doing your enemies a favour.

Now, as a workaround, #copyleft is NOT perfect. In particular, #GNU licenses have too many loop holes.

BUT, if you don't protect your work so that its evolutions will stay in the #commons, you are renouncing to any hope for your principles to spread.

A #community is defined by the rules that protect what the members held in #common from their own individual egoisms.

So if you look at things into an historical perspective, you should see that putting work into the public domain is always to support oppressors in the long run.

While I'm happy to look something more effective than GNU licenses, a a strong Copyleft can slow down a bit the Embrace, Extend and Extinguish strategy that is the immune system of #Capitalism.

@walruslifestyle@octodon.social