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Comment by davidp | Hacker News Reader

Copyright is the foundation of all FLOSS licenses, from GPL to MIT. You might know that already, but that's a sharp double-edged sword you're swinging.

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Without copyright, you don't need a license for content to be Free. There may be another edge to the sword, but it ain't the one you are pointing at.

With the GPL at least, its major clauses are aimed at restricting software from being incorporated into closed systems. I don't know if eliminating that control was what the GP had in mind, but it would be one of the perhaps-unexpected effects.

See also: Licenses that prohibit use for military purposes or other things the authors consider undesirable.

Without copyright there wouldn't really be "closed systems" any more --- sure, you might not have the original source, but it also becomes legal to decompile and publish the results --- and as the cracker/hacker/security community has shown, source isn't mandatory for doing interesting things with software.

If anything, the loss of copyright would cause a great advance in reverse-engineering technology --- and also attempts at defending from it. IMHO not such a bad thing after all.

Thats simply wrong, educate yourself young man!

Flipside: copyright is a human construct. So is the GPL and concept of copyleft. It is possible to eliminate one thing (say, overbearing copyright) and protect another. Rather than creating a class of works under license which cannot be constrained, it might be possible to create a set of works under law which may be designated with equivalent protections.

Or find other means to the same ends as the GPL: protecting the three freedoms laid out by RMS.

Did GPL or MIT ever actually go to court to enforce the license?

Yes, for example, VMware got sued in Germany a couple years ago: https://sfconservancy.org/news/2015/mar/05/vmware-lawsuit/

But most proprietary vendors these days do comply with the GPL.

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