On 2026-07-14 17:09, Russ Allbery wrote: > 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*.
Thanks Russ, this perfectly captures my own sentiment. I'm always deeply surprised how the strongly the GPL is considered to be the all-empowering magic bullet of free software. Of course I understand the ideology, but in practice it is often completely detached from reality, even opposed to it. Especially for small projects. I'll note that over the past two decades, corporations have started publishing massive amounts of open source software -- and typically under MIT or Apache 2.0 licenses. They don't seem to see the GPL as a magic bullet either. On the contrary; one could reasonably conclude that they believe the other two licenses help their open source projects succeed even more. Looking at this trend of two decades, I believe the open source movement has won. And I believe the GPL was instrumental to helping the principle of open source succeed in its early days. But the principle has long overtaken its early enforcer, and the GPL is simply no longer that useful in most contexts -- to the contrary, actually. (To be clear, this is not a general attack on the GPL. I'm agreeing with Russ on the "most other situations". Of course there are situations where it can make sense, the Linux kernel being a prime example.) > 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.
