Simon Josefsson <[email protected]> writes: > Let's say in 10 years that companies have sponsored BSD/Expat-rewrites > (possibly LLM-assisted) of essentially all common GPL'd tools, and has > showed multi-year sustained QA and release process of those projects. > Compare OpenSSL, Clang or UUtils as inspirational projects.
> At the same time, development of GNU coreutils, sed, tar, gzip etc have > slowed down and are in maintainance mode. > It would then be easy to make the argument that those rewrites are > "technically excellent". Yes, this is a scenario in which copyleft gets utterly crushed in the marketplace of ideas. If that happens, there indeed probably won't be very much copyleft remaining. We would still be living in a world that is superior from a software freedom perspective in essentially every respect to the world of the late 1980s, but I do understand why you would like to see more resources put into copyleft software. Personally, I agree with the fight against corporate control of software, but I think copyleft is only one tool that is only useful in some narrow and specific situations. It has helped the Linux kernel immensely, and I think good lessons should be learned from that. If you have a massive copyleft code base and vast commercial incentives for contributing to that code base, copyleft is incredibly powerful and forces a lot of code to be free software that wouldn't otherwise be. But I think its utility in most other situations is overstated. I find it very hard to see a way in which copyleft matters one iota to the advancement of free software when used as the license for some small personal project, for example. I do not use copyleft for any of my personal software, not because I disagree with its use tactically as a tool, but because I cannot envision any scenario in which it would ever be meaningful *for that piece of software*. Copyleft imposes a bunch of overhead (or at least does so in theory; many of the people who use the GPL have clearly never read it and don't actually follow its rules) and requires users read tedious legal documents, and I personally don't like imposing those costs for no obvious gain. This is my problem with your argument: It is absurdly reductive to the point of being religious rather than reasoned. Copyleft is not some magic spell that protects us from corporations. It's just a tool, which is useful in some situations and not in others. But perhaps I'm wrong and copyleft is more important than I think it is. If so, you're going to have to find ways to recruit more people to work on copyleft software, and will probably need to fight political fights in broader society to reduce the currently substantial intrinsic legal advantages for other models. Do you know what will not help in any way with that fight? "Come use our copyleft software; it's poor quality and we rarely write code, but we have lots of moralizing scolds who will lecture you on what software you should be using until you die of old age." > Do you think there could be some reason beyond "technical excellence" > that would make us want to keep using the (strong) copyleft projects? If copyleft loses that thoroughly, no, probably not. > What's left of the spirit of the DSG and DFSG if copyleft software is > replaced? ...all of it? The DFSG has nothing whatsoever to do with copyleft? That's a world full of free software. It's a world in which we won. Sounds great! Sure, it could be *better*, but from the perspective of 1993 me, that sounds like a glorious victory that warrants massive celebration. -- Russ Allbery ([email protected]) <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
