Why copyleft?

[sounds]

a moral imperative

Pot, meet kettle.

[StudlyCaps]

Pot, meet kettle.

Not really following you here. I don't think I'm moralizing.

[linguofreak]

In a theoretical sense I think the FSF represents a kind of ultimate alienation of programmers from their labour. They do all the work, but the economic rewards for that work go to SaaS providers who repackage their products as managed services,

The economic benefit was already going to the large tech companies anyways. What copyleft does is that now programmers working for large tech companies can do things like *reusing code that they wrote at one job at another job*, or *reusing code that they wrote at work in hobby projects*. The code resulting from their work is now less likely to end up locked up forever behind their employer's proprietary license (how's *that* for being alienated from your labor?).

Now, are Stallman and the FSF full of ****? Quite. All the linking restrictions in the main GPL are problematic in a number of ways (like, how are you going to enforce them without arguing *for* the copyrightability of APIs, which all of the FSF's favorite corporate bogeymen will just *love*). But the general concept of copyleft is fairly sound.

[zaval]

for me, all this FSF/GPL/copyleft thing is just a lunacy of one man, that has turned into a religion. craze for those, that are more stupid, benefit for those, that are smarter, that is. it's weird, that it happened, but on the other hand, all (many) religions probably appeared like this. just new realities, new religions. maybe one day, we will get something similar about I don't know tiktok "stories". still, it looks funny to read their "philosophy". I genuinely don't understand how software is any different from everything else, made by people and why it necessarily should be open sourced. so, when I read, that "proprietary software is amoral and a social issue", I am like pff, yeah, dude, whatever, take your pills and go keep eating your toe cheese, please.

[chilly]

Why copyleft? Because hard-core socialist types like to take advantage of the legal system to push their political ideology on everyone else. Or maybe not, who knows.

[GwenCat]

I came from the Shareware / Giftware / Freeware world of the Aminet. People providing (test versions of) their software, without the source, so you could see if it solved whatever problem you might have. You might have had to pay a modest sum after the test period expired, or the author might have asked to send a post card, or it might have been completely free. But what you got was software that had a clear idea behind it, and tried to stand on it's own. There was none of this "fix it yourself if you don't like it" stuff, and the authors took pride in a software well made. I can't help but feel that, from a user perspective, the software of that time was better than contemporary software from other markets. For one, you got proper documentation with that software, because you couldn't offload that to someone else...

GPL basically killed that community. They told everyone that such things as Free-/Shareware were evil, that everybody should program for free, and that you could get payed for providing documentation or support services, which I hold to be an essential part of a good software...

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.en.html

I have personally myself managed to work as a professional software engineer without ever having to produce nonfree software.

It's about freedom, not money.

Feel free to disagree with the free software movement, but don't misrepresent it.

[GwenCat]

To quote from https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-sou ... nt.html.en:

For the free software movement, however, nonfree software is a social problem, and the solution is to stop using it and move to free software.

I can't really express the amount of disgust I have for this POV.

Just because you wrote some code, does not mean you should get to control my computing, and it doesn't mean you should have unjust power over other people.

I will make a point of never using any software written by you though, if that is your view.

This whole thread amazes me because the osdev.org wiki is full of resources that only exist because the contributors value sharing access to knowledge. That's a beautiful thing. You aren't obligated to do it of course, but at the same time I don't believe that anyone has a duty to hand over control of their computing (and therefore frequently large aspects of how they live their lives due to the central role computers play in our society) to you just because you demand it.

Make money all you want, that's not the problem. I think the real issue is how many people don't understand that free software does not mean "doesn't cost money".

I'd happily pay MORE for free software than for proprietary software that restricts my freedom.

Also, I personally am less radical on this than most - I'll accept nonfree software for unimportant stuff like games or whatever, but never for something as critical as my OS.