The GPL and copyleft licenses are not about "getting in return" and selfishness. They are tools for a strategy meant to ensure end user's rights. Now, is this s

The GPL and copyleft licenses are not about "getting in return" and selfishness. They are tools for a strategy meant to ensure end user's rights. Now, is this strategy working? Maybe. Yes for several ecosystems actually: R, QGis, WordPress, Nextcloud, XWiki… extensions are free software under GPL. De facto, or because it's a requirement. And it works, healthy businesses exist while end users enjoy the benefits of open source. There are licenses that force you to contribute your changes back to the authors, and they are considered non-free. GPL only forces you to provide the sources to your users. GitHub are the one benefiting from open source while not contributing their core business code. Who is selfish now? Let's not swap roles. GPL authors always have contributed their code. It feels bizarre to call them selfish. GitHub is not giving free space and bandwidth out of their heart. It's a business strategy. It's a call product for their Enterprise edition and also a way to control the open source community like Google controls the web using Chrome. It's convenient. Even Microsoft's competitors are tied to Microsoft products. There's no mystery why they bought GitHub and about the fact they'll keep this ecosystem closed.