alt Hacker NewsI think copyleft was a mistake. I don't understand the value of it beyond increasing the reach of open source, it has no direct benefit to the source. It imposes a higher cost than if you just charged for the license. Not to mention the cost to the publisher of enforcing it.
Open source is about freedom, that should include the freedom of consumers to make whatever choice fits their target. If we want to increase its reach, we should emphasize the value of that freedom. People have a strong instinct for reciprocity and it is strongest when it is entirely their choice.
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Open Source was made by someone. With copyleft they decided: You can use my code, you can modify my code but if you build on my work you will also open source that.
Open Source is not necessarily a business decision but often a personal one. Often authors start without any pay but instead because they thought it was a nice thing they want to share. So it's their right to say what people can or can't do with their original work.
Companies have the ability to write their own software if they don't want to follow these rules.
That presumes consumers have a choice to make in maintaining that freedom.
For a concrete example look at OpenWRT, there were not many good choices before copyleft forced the linksys release. Now they have exploded and there is an entire ecosystem of open software and modifications on routers.
Copyleft is about freedom of consumers to make whatever choice fits their target, unlike permissive licensing, which is about freedom of corporations to take away freedom of consumers.
> People have a strong instinct for reciprocity and it is strongest when it is entirely their choice.
My experience disagree with that statement. The places where I find the strongest form of reciprocity is when social norms heavily emphasize reciprocity and punish defectors, which is typical in environments where peoples survivability depend on social norms and reciprocity.
A typical example is rural community vs a city. In a rural community there is existing and historical dependency on reciprocity to handle accidents (a barn burning down, a poor harvest, a bad hunt/fishing season, and so on). Defectors from the social norms can be punished for several generations ("I remember that your grandfather did not help my grandfather"), which makes defecting rare and expensive. The stereotypical example from large cities is that a person can bleed out on the street and people will continue to walk past, pretending to not see.
Naturally neither is an utopia and both has their own problem, but saying that the strongest form of reciprocity is found in places with no social norms, social expectations or enforcement seems to be plainly wrong from my experience.