alt Hacker NewsThis article is already largely irrelevant. The GPL (and the FSF), whether you like it or not, always has been a political movement. The aim of the movement is to expand the pool of free/libre software and to disallow commercial entities from gaining an unfair advantage without contributing back. With the GPLv2 they already have, as it permits them to run the software in the cloud, with their proprietary additions, without contributing back. AGPLv3 closes that loophole that's why it's even less popular.
You can license your software as you wish, but in the long run the GPL has ensured that contributions reach back upstream for the common good, rather than for profit. The GPL gives protections for the people/end consumers, much like labour laws do in your own country. The GPL ensures that your contributions are respected, available to all, and not abused for profit (not always true, but tribunals have enforced the license terms before). The GPL has the effect of doing this globally while allowing contributions back from a global audience. It's genius and the companies absolutely hate it.
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The article makes the point that, in practice, permissively-licenced projects see more contributions back. Copyleft projects are being rewritten as proprietary instead (with a few exceptions like Linux, which are too big to fail). The end result may be even worse for the user, if the proprietary alternative ends up being the most developed one, grows an ecosystem and a network effect, and eventually everyone is forced to use that. There's plenty of examples.
It's not about "fairness". It's about reality and survival characteristics.
As a user, I care about my freedom too. But permissively-licenced projects give me enough freedom to choose them over copyleft projects that are even slightly worse in quality
Your comment is ignoring the realities and practicialities in the real world, just like GPL does. GPL is a theoretical idea that doesn't work in the real world, because in the real world, not everyone wants to or even can share their work products with everyone, and especially not just because some person talking about "libre software" says so. No one really cares if they have access to their refrigerator's source code.
There are many, many software libraries and tools that are excellent and yet aren't popular. A very common reason as to why they aren't more popular is because they are often licensed with GPL.
I agree.
People seem to judge these licenses with measures that might not mean anything to the authors or the users. There are different kinds of authors and users.
GPL authors want their rights preserved for the users. MIT authors might just want their stuff "out there", or really not care how their stuff is used.
The aregument here is sort of like judging football as more relevant than baseball because plays are more exciting but short enough to still show ads on TV.
(also both gpl and bsd licenses have been around ~40 years, so what does long run even mean?)