alt Hacker News>But think of the multi-trillion dollar companies!!
If companies want to use manpower to reimplement GPL code, then fine. It’s always funny how accommodating people are for these companies.
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throw_m239339 • yesterday at 4:40 PM
Some people always forget that GPL is about the end user's rights, not developer's rights. If a fortune 500 re-implements some GPL library to make proprietary, then by all means. It changes nothing for the GPL code, it's still GPL and its license should guaranty user's rights.
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The point of the article is that:
1. In most areas, they eventually will!
2. If there is a permissively-licensed project in that area, at least there's a decent chance that the "reimplementation" will be a fork of that project. At that fork has a decent chance of staying open or even being merged back into the upstream. That benefits the community more than a proprietary from-scratch rewrite (which would follow from a GPL-only open-source scene)