Yep.
GPL is the greatest thing that has ever happened to software and this stuff seeks to destroy it.
GPL is the greatest thing that has ever happened to software and this stuff seeks to destroy it.
I think that worked for many while the job market was pumping, VC was flowing, and the BigCorps were hiring and spending money like crazy. So people didn't feel particularly exploited.
But I'm expecting the bias in the community will shift back to copyleft as the BigCorps show their true nature with the rounds of layoffs, mandatory RTO, cutbacks in perks, etc.
Why spend a single moment of your time doing unpaid hours doing free work for these people?
I've personally gone back to putting my (modest and used by nobody, to be fair) projects under GPLv3.
I don't really get why some employees push for permissive licenses. As an employee, my code belongs to my company, not to me. If I somehow have to depend on e.g. a GPLv2 project, then suddenly my code gets higher chances of getting public, which is better for me as an employee.
Say my company allows me to open source my code, then copyleft is (again) better for me as an employee, because I force other companies (those who would use my code) to publish more of their code.
It makes sense if you consider that for many people their projects are kind of like a resume or a branding situation. "Owning" a project or framework is like building up a portfolio. And for some GitHub is as much a social network as it is a utility. I was definitely in this mindset after I left my long-term job and needed to hunt for work, and I understand the motives in a sense. If you have your stuff under permissive license, more people will use it, and your own "brand" is bettered.
But I think in the long run it's not great.
Consider using the AGPL. Your users will be better protected by that. (If they use your software via third-party server, the middlemen cannot forbid your users to access and modify your source code.)
The stuff I write isn't likely to be used by anybody who isn't "weird" and nerdy anyways so I don't fear theft from SaaS right now.
1. For anything internal, they already had free work from GPL. They can even modify it - the for them unfortunate side-effects only apply if they need to distribute it to outsiders, as only those receiving a copy need access to the source.
2. For anything external in this particular example, they can either use GPL projects unmodified (no effort required on their part in that case), or they could get all these bits from BSD with a BSD license already and do whatever they want.
GPL - and more importantly, AGPL - is definitely important for full-fledged products that can be monetized and abused, with improvements never made available. Note that no common license require any degree of upstream collaboration.
coreutils on the other hand isn't such a full product. This project hardly enables anything new - they could just use a BSD userspace or other portable coreutils clone - but if I end up exposed to some included coreutils in a proprietary product, I'd much rather have that they could easily include a proper one. The same logic applies to many other things too.
With GPL3, that covers pretty much everything from laptops to online databases. Which is why Apple, for example, has worked very hard to rip any GPL code out of their systems.
> This project hardly enables anything new - they could just use a BSD userspace or other portable coreutils clone
Yes, but it is a competitive disadvantage to ship something less familiar. Again, the Apple example shows most developers would run to replace the shipped utilities with GNU versions instead, which was good for the ecosystem as a whole - less so for Apple, of course, which lost some control on target toolchains and suffered a competitive disadvantage towards Linux machines (minor, sure, but every little helps).
It's sad that this particular project is headed by Mozilla people, who are supposed to care about the health of the opensource community as a whole, and still does the wrong thing - probably out of a (vaguely desperate) hunt for widespread adoption of Rust, at the expense of the overall free-software community.
You need to understand how evil corporations work. They may be composed of perfectly reasonable people but, taken as a whole, they are literally psychopathic. It's not that they are "waiting" for something to be possible, it's just that at every step they will take anything and everything they can and give back as little as they possibly can.
Have you ever been in such a corporation and tried to say you should release source code when you don't have to? You'd be laughed out of the room.
Don't be fooled by companies like Microsoft taking part in "open source". They have simply calculated that right now it's advantageous for them to appear that way. But they are always taking the maximum and giving back the minimum, no matter what. We won't change this, but we can raise what that minimum is. That's why we have the GPL.