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Comment by stackghost

13 hours ago

Not to be Debbie Downer but software licensing has no effect on what matters to billions of people.

We are facing very real global and societal issues that people on this site are actively exacerbating, like disinformation and climate change.

If a dude changing an inconsequential text file on GitHub gives you hope for the world, then please broaden your perspective.

So I'm guessing you don't do anything except what matters to billions of people? Always 100% fully generalized contributions, never making your local world a better place? Your only local contributions being to tell off people who are grateful that their lives are materially improved by someone else's smaller actions... You must be beloved by your community.

  • [flagged]

    • Yet here you are, posting self-congratulatory comments about how you don't post self-congratulatory things.

      IMHO this is even less meaningful/impactful than the comment that you objected to.

    • I don't think the point you're trying to make improves the quality of the discussion here. If a downstream project laments a license and the author changes it, that's good communication and cooperation. Complaining that people are happy with the outcome isn't productive.

Making one small corner of the world a little bit better is a good thing. There's not much use in complaining that it's not as big of an impact as could hypothetically be achieved on some larger issues.

  • “He who would do good to another must do it in minute particulars. General good is the plea of the scoundrel, hypocrite, and flatterer.” -- William Blake

Not GP but I feel like that's kinda their point - the fact that we still have this platform to collaborate in such an organic way is truly remarkable and must not be taken for granted.

This is verifiably false. Without copyleft licensing like the GPL or permissive licensing like MIT and Apache we literally would not have the internet, or it would be somehow even more wildly dystopian and proprietary than it already is.

Actually a lot of that bad stuff billionaires are doing is enabled by MIT licensed software. Like, device lockdown is illegal with GPL3

  • People are concerned about having homes to live in and having food to eat. They aren't concerned about 'device lockdown'. Try to see the bigger picture.