> has anybody considered that maybe Richard Stallman was wrong? > maybe it ISN'T a good idea to volunteer your time to write libraries that corporations will u

> has anybody considered that maybe Richard Stallman was wrong? > maybe it ISN'T a good idea to volunteer your time to write libraries that corporations will use to make billions... If you are writing libraries that are being used by companies as part of proprietary software at all -- much less to make billions -- then you didn't pay attention to Richard Stallman. > isn't the whole point of intellectual property law to align incentives? Yes: which is why Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation specifically came up with a model which uses copyright law against proprietary software via the idea of "copyleft". I think there are people out there who fundamentally believe in doing service for other people... as long as they aren't taken advantage of! Aligning this incentive by encoding this moral contract into a civil one is the goal of the FSF. (Now, I won't say they nailed it... GPL2 failed to foresee and prevent DRM, and even GPL3 has issues with the new era of cloud hosting; but like, they did much better than anyone probably should have expected.) Contrary to the title of this LWN post, PCRE2 is not "Free Software" and is actually licensed under BSD; the result is that, yes: a ton of companies use this library and they make billions.