Re: The sad decline of copyleft software licenses? :(

[Matt Ivie]

On Wed, 2020-09-23 at 12:13 +0200, Marinus Savoritias wrote:
> A permissive license absolutely hurts the user. Any company or bad
> actor 
> can just take the project, re license it and close source it.
> 
An educated developer will see that their freedoms would be robbed were
they to support that product and would hopefully keep working on the
free version.

> That takes away user freedom. If anybody and any company can just
> close 
> source the work that is not freedom.
> 
No one is required to use the non-free version. Development could
easily continue on the free version.
> If it is the same freedom let's delete GPL go to MIT and call it a
> day.
> 
As has been pointed out, many "permissive" licenses are free software
licenses. Are they ideal? No, copyleft is ultimately better for
freedom. Are they free? On a case by case basis they can be deemed free
or non-free. It would be ideal to reach out to devs and help them
understand the issues. You can't convince everyone and at the end of
the day we will have licenses that are free that don't include a
copyleft clause.

> Marinus Savoritias
> 
> On 9/22/20 11:28 PM, Jean Louis wrote:
> > * Marinus Savoritias <marinus.savoritias@disroot.org> [2020-09-22
> > 22:26]:
> > > I 100% completely agree with that.
> > > And personally the question I get is that:
> > > Why is FSF promotes and/or approves of non-copyleft if all it
> > > does is harm
> > > the user?
> > 
> > Please see here the stance of GNU:
> > https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html
> > 
> > If it is free software it is good. If it is copyleft, is better.
> > That
> > is simple to understand.
> > 
> > I do not see how free software licenses harm the user. If you use
> > exclusively free software, a permissive free software license will
> > not
> > harm an user.
> > 
> > Jean
> > 
> 
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