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Comment by enriquto | Hacker News Reader

> The best aspects of GPL work didn't manifest

That's strongly from the point of view of people who are mainly developers.

But the main beneficiaries of the GPL are not developers but users: users of GPL software have the right to view and modify the code that runs on their computers. On the contrary, users of BSD-licensed software may have had this right stripped by middlemen between the author of the software and them.

The GPL may annoy some developers but it always makes the users happier, and I think that's beautiful.

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A user who is not also a developer has no ability to meaningfully view and modify the code, and thus doesn't care.

And what is your point? It's a freedom that they still have. They can always hire some developer to help them.

That it is reasonable to prioritize freedoms that are actually exercised to freedoms that are nice in theory but never used.

I also own a car for which I have almost none of the skills to meaningfully maintain and repair, but frequently exercise my right to contract a third party to do that work for me.

The same is true for software, and I benefit even if I'm not the one paying for the work myself. The modern internet would look very different if KHTML hadn't been a GPL/LGPL project and Apple had been allowed to hold their changes in WebKit as a proprietary secret, and the same for Chrome/Blink. Companies can be users too, and the virality ensures that every user sees the benefits.

Vast majority of users don't care for the source code, nor even know what source code is. And personally, as a developer, I never bothered to look at the source code of software I've used, much less fix or extend it - and that goes for all the devs I know personally.

I don't think it does. A user who cannot have an application to solve their problem (because no developer they can find to pay will write it for them because some key ingredient of the solution is in a GPL'd library) is not happier than a user who has a solution built of closed-source code combined with BSD-licensed code.

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