alt Hacker News>I think GPL and copyleft in general is getting less and less relevant as time goes on. Looking at GPL specifically it relies on scarcity. The reason companies would agree to the terms of the GPL
Therein is the great misunderstanding , the GPL was never written for 'companies' , it was and still is for the User. You, Me a $MEGACORP , sentinel islander - it does not matter the rights are granted to all equally to reuse/modify/offer for sale as long as the contributoins come back to the commons.
What is happening now is akin to the 'enclosure system' in early Britain when the commons which had been for the benefit of all were fenced off and the peasants thrown off the land to seek wages in the newly industialising system.
When no one is contributing to the GPL commons the options become more restricted. If one isnt a corp that can write their own library or a 10X coder that can bash it out on their own , leaves the users looking at proprietary solutions or restricted offerings with two tier licences.
So in a way yeah most coder/engineers have developed an antagonistic relation to the GPL commons , which is leading to its decline in some sectors.However if/when the share of GPL drops to a level where the adverse effects can no longer be ignored , there will probably be attempts to rollback the clock.
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I think companies figured out how to get around the GPL by simply not distributing software.
The user has a right to know what software runs on their machine? Screw that, we'll keep all the software (and now user data too) on our side, and the user can throw rest calls over the fence.
> Therein is the great misunderstanding , the GPL was never written for 'companies' , it was and still is for the User.
I didn't say it was, but what it was written for and what it became since writing software has changed so radically are two different things. For example the kernel Linux used to be written primarily by hobbyist hackers, now it is in large part written by $MEGACORP.
> When no one is contributing to the GPL commons the options become more restricted. If one isnt a corp that can write their own library or a 10X coder that can bash it out on their own , leaves the users looking at proprietary solutions or restricted offerings with two tier licences.
Doesn't the progress of FreeBSD (and OpenBSD) fly in the face of that? It only gets better with age, adds new features, and manages to do so while being permissively licensed.