alt Hacker NewsDon't fall for this trap! GrapheneOS leadership is very against Copyleft, probably to cater to it's corporate sponsors, and copyright is really the only thing that protects Free Software at all. Proprietary software can be kept secret, and only shared as a binary, but the only thing that protects Free Software (open source) is copyright law.
It's not perfect, and the terms are far too long, but we do want to keep it. Reduce it to 20 years and we'd be golden.
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fedeb95 • today at 7:40 AM
I don't agree. Free software would still be free even if copyright were to be abolished, if anything it would flourish further. That is because even proprietary software could be better integrated.
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> but the only thing that protects Free Software (open source) is copyright law.
Can you elaborate on that? I have done a lot of open source (professionally and in my free time), and I don't see it.
I have exactly one example where I see that copyleft is useful, and that's Linux: it is nice to be able to get the downstream kernel. I genuinely don't have another example.
For smaller projects (even not that small actually), my feeling is that a Copyleft licence is just an opportunity for a competing project to come with a permissive licence. It happened to me in a library I built: people complained about my choice of MPLv2, eventually someone started a competing library with a permissive licence and everybody jumped on it.
An example of a not-so-small project I have is Ardupilot: as a user I love that GPLv3 should make it possible for me to access (and reflash!) it, but it seems to me that the GPLv3 was clearly an opportunity for PX4 to gain traction (Ardupilot even got evicted from Dronecode).
So yeah, I totally understand the appeal of copyleft in theory, but in practice I'm a bit more skeptical. And I say that as someone who actually licences my projects as copyleft.