On Tue, Jul 14, 2026 at 08:09:57AM -0500, Russ Allbery wrote:
> 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.
The license is only the reason why a project might be more or less
successful compared to its competition. For example, there were a
number of people who found it hard to contribute to BSD (for a variety
of reasons, but they weren't related to copyright; there was the
perfect being the enemy of the good, internal politics, etc.) I never
was a compiler developer, but I recall in the 2000's the assertion that
it was much harder to get a change into gcc compared to clang, and
this may have had something to do with developers and companies
choosing to contribute to clang over gcc.
So even in the case of a large, complex codebase, I would argue that
the effects of the license can be overstated.
- Ted
