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chii • today at 6:45 AM • 1 reply • view on HN

Everything you listed is exactly the reason why copyleft and GPLv3 needs to be the first and foremost license when opensourcing. If proliferated, it can give you all of these freedoms listed that you (and i) desire.


Replies

Terr_ • today at 8:50 AM

> If proliferated, it can give you all of these freedoms listed that you (and i) desire.

Hold up, let's not oversell things here. GPL/Copyleft just means that you have to share source if you share binaries. However big companies exploit the digital commons differently now.

Instead they run the important pieces remotely in their data-centers, and release neither binary nor source. If they do a client binary (e.g. phone apps), they can just sprinkle in some naive encryption and some "copyrighted content" on the server. Then if you make a custom client--or even document how to do it--you might go to jail. [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-circumvention_laws