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Comment by lukeschlather

5 months ago

> If you wanna get your thing to rewrite curl or something, that's again really weird but fine, but just don't share it or try to make money off of it.

The whole point of the GPL is to encourage sharing! Making money off of GPL code is not encouraged by the text of the license, but it is encouraged by the people who wrote the licenses. Saying "don't share it" is antithetical to the goals of the free software movement.

I feel like everyone is getting distracted by protecting copyright, when in fact the point of the GPL is that we should all share and share alike. The GPL is a negotiation tactic, it is not an end unto itself. And curl, I might note, is permissively licensed so there's no need for a clean room reimplementation. If someone's rewriting it I'm very interested to hear why and I hope they share their work. I'm mostly indifferent to how they license it.