So the gist of the article is: * Big companies use FOSS but don't contribute back * Small developers that want to contribute to FOSS can't use GPL because it'

So the gist of the article is: * Big companies use FOSS but don't contribute back * Small developers that want to contribute to FOSS can't use GPL because it's not business friendly * Contributing to FOSS can be life threatening -> The author is losing trust in FOSS, presumably as a viable alternative to proprietary software. While I'm pretty sympathetic to pretty much all of these points, I find it kind of contradictory. Big companies do contribute back to FOSS, though not nearly as much as is needed to maintain the critical FOSS infrastructure that we rely on. I think this is the most salient of the points and this is an issue we're trying to figure out. My only suggestion would be to try and devote more tax dollars to funding people or organizations that create this critical infrastructure instead of relying on the goodwill of large corporations. In terms of using some permissive license rather than GPL/AGPL, all I can say is that if you want to change the state of things, you have to fight for it. There was a point when any FOSS license was considered toxic and there was a lot of FUD around it. You want to make sure businesses contribute back? Create an environment of copyleft software so that proprietary software will be left in an island that is ever shrinking, so they're either forced to devote more resources to their proprietary walled garden or they adopt the copyleft infrastructure. And in terms of being in the public eye and getting public scrutiny or hate, with the occasional death threat, that sucks but it's also indicative of the nature of our connectivity and anonymity. There are many online celebrities, from "A-list" all the way down, that get a lot of hate that never mention FOSS. It's not right but it's also not restricted to FOSS. But the overall sentiment, "there are problems with FOSS so I don't trust it", seems pretty cynical. For all of it's problems, the reason it's so successful is because it offers such a dramatic benefit. My personal take is that copyright is so deeply broken, without any clear path to fixing it, that workarounds like FOSS are so successful because they provide a relief from intellectual properly overreach. My view is that FOSS is wildly successful. The problems we're seeing are "second order" in that they're coming to light because we've changed to Overton window so much that FOSS is the norm rather than the exception and now we're trying to improve the models we have to support it rather than merely fighting for its right to exist.