Comment by 2lup382_
3 hours ago
I think GPL and copyleft in general is getting less and less relevant as time goes on. Looking at GPL specifically it relies on scarcity. The reason companies would agree to the terms of the GPL in the 1980s, 90s, and even 00s was if you wanted a good compiler, parser, kernel, or library you had only so many choices. There might have been only a few thousand people in the world capable of writing a mature compiler suite at some points. So if you're $MEGACORP you could either a) buy a proprietary compiler, b) pay for rarified (so expensive) talent to write your own, c) tolerate the terms imposed by the GPL. Most companies saw option "C" as the more cost effective one. Now there is a lot of computer science talent out there, so the price of option "B" goes way down. Why tolerate the GPL when I can hire any of the people laid off from Microsoft, Meta, Oracle, Amazon, come work for me, and all of them probably wrote a compiler in college and I get to own the code outright. Or, I can use FreeBSD, LLVM, whatever, and maybe there is a chance for $MEGACORP to contribute back, where in option "B" there is almost no chance. And this doesn't even take LLMs into consideration.
>I think GPL and copyleft in general is getting less and less relevant as time goes on. Looking at GPL specifically it relies on scarcity. The reason companies would agree to the terms of the GPL
Therein is the great misunderstanding , the GPL was never written for 'companies' , it was and still is for the User. You, Me a $MEGACORP , sentinel islander - it does not matter the rights are granted to all equally to reuse/modify/offer for sale as long as the contributoins come back to the commons.
What is happening now is akin to the 'enclosure system' in early Britain when the commons which had been for the benefit of all were fenced off and the peasants thrown off the land to seek wages in the newly industialising system.
When no one is contributing to the GPL commons the options become more restricted. If one isnt a corp that can write their own library or a 10X coder that can bash it out on their own , leaves the users looking at proprietary solutions or restricted offerings with two tier licences.
So in a way yeah most coder/engineers have developed an antagonistic relation to the GPL commons , which is leading to its decline in some sectors.However if/when the share of GPL drops to a level where the adverse effects can no longer be ignored , there will probably be attempts to rollback the clock.
> Therein is the great misunderstanding , the GPL was never written for 'companies' , it was and still is for the User.
I didn't say it was, but what it was written for and what it became since writing software has changed so radically are two different things. For example the kernel Linux used to be written primarily by hobbyist hackers, now it is in large part written by $MEGACORP.
> When no one is contributing to the GPL commons the options become more restricted. If one isnt a corp that can write their own library or a 10X coder that can bash it out on their own , leaves the users looking at proprietary solutions or restricted offerings with two tier licences.
Doesn't the progress of FreeBSD (and OpenBSD) fly in the face of that? It only gets better with age, adds new features, and manages to do so while being permissively licensed.
I think companies figured out how to get around the GPL by simply not distributing software.
The user has a right to know what software runs on their machine? Screw that, we'll keep all the software (and now user data too) on our side, and the user can throw rest calls over the fence.
AGPLv3 is the answer to that.
Yeah. Free software used to have so much more leverage back then. Now even GCC isn't sacred anymore. Linux is the only project that's still somewhat capable of leveraging corporations into upstreaming GPL drivers.
Just extremely low morale right now. Not sure if there's even a point to any of this anymore. Even proprietary software isn't safe: now that I've got AI, decompilation has gone from a time consuming grind to trivial.
The fundamental problem that most people want free software to solve isn't the user-level problem of "I want to tinker with all of the software I run," but the community-level problem of "I want to use the results of other people in getting software to run on my setup." In the context of a compiler, that's support for more esoteric architecture; in the context of a kernel, that's support for drivers for hardware.
The GPL doesn't actually solve the community-level problem very well (which is the basis of Linus's complaints about GPLv3--it positions the license much more directly in the direction of the user-level freedom rather than the community-level freedom). But the solution for the community-level problem involves a lot of social pressure, and it turns out that for a large open-source project, commit velocity means that most proprietary companies find the easiest way to deal with the open-source upstream is to contribute their code to the community to make it everybody else's problem to maintain.
You can see this in the development of LLVM, e.g.: almost all of the proprietary compilers are LLVM-based (especially as EDG has finally thrown in the towel, everyone using EDG is going to look to rebasing onto clang instead). And yet the companies with their proprietary forks of LLVM are still major upstream contributors.
> used to have so much more leverage back then
And maybe that was required back then, and/or maybe it ended up being bad strategy in the long term. Leverage only gets you so far, especially in community and relationships.
> Just extremely low morale right now. Not sure if there's even a point to any of this anymore.
See I feel the exact opposite. As FOSS license choice matters less, now we can just focus on hacking. FreeBSD doing this is a great example of it.
> now we can just focus on hacking
Well, I can't do that. Releasing software under permissive licenses is just wealth transfer from well meaning hackers straight into the pockets of corporations. It just gives it all away, no questions asked.
For me it's either AGPLv3 or all rights reserved. I'm trending towards the latter now. I'm starting to question whether I should even publish my work.
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