> As a legal tool to promote greater software freedom, I believe copyleft software licenses have largely failed, since they have done nothing to stop the rise o

> As a legal tool to promote greater software freedom, I believe copyleft software licenses have largely failed, since they have done nothing to stop the rise of cloud software, and probably not done much to increase the share of software whose source is available. A license alone cannot solve the problems. A license is a tool to be used by humans, software developers in this case. "Cloud" is a marketing word for XaaS, and it is not a problem as the author argues: I have no issue with mastodon.social hosting all my toots and interactions, not just because I trust the admin (I could trust gmail's admin) but because I have the assurance that the software must be able to give me back all my data, and that I can interact with it the way it says in the source code. You know why ? Because Mastodon is AGPL. You know what created the rise of Cloud ? Open source non-copyleft software, being already developed by communities and ready-to-reuse, adopted by companies who just had to pick and collect those bricks, glue them, and capture users. It's not that copyleft failed to prevent that, it's that non-copyleft actually helped it. Author is completely wrong in targetting the former and should question why the latter is possible and whether it's good for society. To be honest I'm stunned at the recent attacks on the free software movement. I could understand RMS' wrongdoings creating some outrage in the usually vocal tech bubble echo chamber, but now people are coming out of the wookdwork at the same time and making the association between RMS and the FSF and between the FSF and (A)GPL, and because one is bad all of them are bad. It's just a license, I don't get the desire to actively avoid it. I'm starting to wonder if that wouldn't be the work of software developers who want to restrict rights to their users in the name of sustainability, and are just blind to the effect that has on users' freedom > You might argue that a software license is something that an individual developer can control, whereas governmental regulation and public policy is a much bigger issue outside of any one individual’s power. Yes, but how much impact can you really have by choosing a software license? Anyone who doesn’t like your license can simply choose not to use your software, in which case your power is zero. Effective change comes from collective action on big issues, not from one person’s little open source side project choosing one license over another. Both are complementary. An individual developer can use the AGPL license and work towards government regulations to safeguard user's freedom. There's no reason the two have to be opposed. In fact a simple regulation can be "if a software is AGPL then the interest of the public is there".