Copyleft licenses are not “restrictive”

https://drewdevault.com/2024/04/19/2024-04-19-Copyleft-is-not-restrictive.html

@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 Actually looking up the details, XFree86 wasn't copylefted or abandoned and rewritten - someone just finished off waning developer interest by adding credit requirements that were incompatible with the GPLv2 (despite the ease of achieving the same thing without being GPLv2-incompatible); https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XFree86?useskin=monobook#2004:_Licensing_controversy https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#XFree861.1License

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).

Yea I remember when this a happened too .. I would download and run the latest XFree86 binaries instead of using the ones from Slackware. There was a whole kerfuffle about attribution. Xorg stayed GPL.

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).

@djsumdog

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.

@Suiseiseki

@freemo @djsumdog well then GPL is working as intended. its meant to cut off proprietarybros from the commons.

@icedquinn

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.

@djsumdog