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The point is: can the ideal of the GPL actually work in the software development world? The answer seems to be "no". You can't build a software development com

The point is: can the ideal of the GPL actually work in the software development world? The answer seems to be "no". You can't build a software development company around a GPL code base. You can build a support services company around that (like RedHat or MySQL did), but that's it. You can build a service company that uses software internally, like Google and Facebook and AWS etc. But the idea that you can build and sell a piece of GPL software is a fantasy of Stallman's and no more than that. Free software has even helped encourage the software-as-a-service world, where no one owns even a copy of a propietary piece of software...

chrisfinazzo 5y ago
You are technically correct, the best kind of correct.
Macha 5y ago
Should they then abandon that ideal and ensure there is no software that provides those benefits? In a world without copyleft, I don't think many of the ecosystems we have today would exist. The alternatives are that this software doesn't exist (because there's no economic incentive to build a business to sell it), or it's permissively licensed and some random other builds a business off it and with the extra resources outcompetes the original. I'd take a world with some free software over none, and I don't see any way to loosen the restrictions to make it more easily broadly commercially viable without causing its own extinction.
- lostcolony 5y ago
  You don't need copyleft licenses to have free software. There is plenty of code that is written that is not a key differentiator, that people will still open source. Parent mentions Goldman Sachs; their trading platform is not something they want to sell, nor want to give away. Their build system, their UI component library, their numeric libraries, etc, could all be things they don't feel give them a material advantage over their competitors, and so it makes sense to open source ('many eyes make any bug shallow' style of thing). These libraries don't need to be copyleft. If someone else wants to extend them and turn them into their secret sauce, who cares? They lose the benefit of it being open source (those many eyes), but if keeping their modifications closed enables a business model that people want to pay them for, they're generating value. And that's something that copyleft -wouldn't- allow, but a permissive open source license (such as MIT) would.

chrisfinazzo 5y ago

You are technically correct, the best kind of correct.

Macha 5y ago

Should they then abandon that ideal and ensure there is no software that provides those benefits? In a world without copyleft, I don't think many of the ecosystems we have today would exist. The alternatives are that this software doesn't exist (because there's no economic incentive to build a business to sell it), or it's permissively licensed and some random other builds a business off it and with the extra resources outcompetes the original. I'd take a world with some free software over none, and I don't see any way to loosen the restrictions to make it more easily broadly commercially viable without causing its own extinction.

lostcolony 5y ago
You don't need copyleft licenses to have free software. There is plenty of code that is written that is not a key differentiator, that people will still open source. Parent mentions Goldman Sachs; their trading platform is not something they want to sell, nor want to give away. Their build system, their UI component library, their numeric libraries, etc, could all be things they don't feel give them a material advantage over their competitors, and so it makes sense to open source ('many eyes make any bug shallow' style of thing). These libraries don't need to be copyleft. If someone else wants to extend them and turn them into their secret sauce, who cares? They lose the benefit of it being open source (those many eyes), but if keeping their modifications closed enables a business model that people want to pay them for, they're generating value. And that's something that copyleft -wouldn't- allow, but a permissive open source license (such as MIT) would.