>There is no them. It's just all us. In many contexts I would agree, but not here. Say I buy a device, and people discover later that it has surveillance code

>There is no them. It's just all us. In many contexts I would agree, but not here. Say I buy a device, and people discover later that it has surveillance code in it. Why can I not just remove it myself? Who do I need to talk to? The developer of that proprietary code. That's "them." >That's a sociological problem, you won't solve that with software. Or licences. >For that you need to get into politics or business. There are many different angles you can take to approach a problem. One of which is politics, sure: we could outlaw software that surveils its users without consent. That's one approach. But a technical approach is also valid: if all software were free, do you really think users would just accept big tech companies surveilling them? Don't you think we'd have people removing the tracking code, and telling their friends how to do the same? And by the way, one of the things we see over and over again from the business world is that incentives matter. No, I don't think all companies would have freed their code if the GPL were prevalent, but if it's significantly easier to make their code free than it is to make it proprietary, certainly more of them would. Just look at the state of Linux drivers on x86: how many of them are free these days, and how many of them are proprietary? There are a few high-profile proprietary drivers, but by and large most of them are free. That's meaningful progress! How many of your drivers are free on Windows? >I haven't see that at all. Open source has never been so popular. Creative common as well. "Open source" has had a surge in popularity, sure, but its current popularity has more to do with corporate interests than an interest in user freedom - which, of course, was why the term was coined in the first place. As a percentage of that software, the use of copyleft licenses has declined in recent years. >I'm glad VLC didn't decide that they couldn't read DVD, or OOo read .doc because there were proprietary formats, otherwise they wouldn't have been the popular softwares of today. Of course supporting existing proprietary formats for the purposes of drawing users to free software is a good thing! I just don't think we should be contributing to the development of more proprietary software. VLC and LibreOffice are both extremely valuable free software projects. (And by the way, they're both copyleft - OpenOffice isn't, but most development has shifted to LibreOffice these days.) >The open source mouvement is not "free to everyone to use and modify, except the ones that don't contribute and profit from it". Of course not! Anyone is free to use and modify any free software, including copyleft software. But I think copyleft is a valuable tool to help us build a software commons.