In the ways that the article mentions, the GPL is as useful as it ever was. Nothing has changed that changes the merits of the GPL. It still gives you the fre

In the ways that the article mentions, the GPL is as useful as it ever was. Nothing has changed that changes the merits of the GPL. It still gives you the freedoms that people want in open source software and it still guards against other companies building proprietary things on top of GPL software. If those protections are what you're looking for, the GPL still provides them as it always has and the Apache license doesn't offer you those protections. I'm not saying whether those protections are good, just that the Apache license and the GPL haven't really changed their stances in a way that one is just so much more 2009 than the other. However, the GPL is outliving its usefulness in another area not mentioned by the article. The GPL is great for software that gets distributed - like a music player that you download or a web browser or whatnot. Once someone distributes it, they have to abide by the license's terms. However, more and more our software isn't being distributed. We're using cloud software which isn't distributed to us. As such, even if someone is using modified GPL code, we have no standing to request the code from them since it wasn't distributed to us in binary form. You might not agree with the free-software philosophy and that's fine, but it is important to see how cloud computing is making it increasingly easy to turn GPL software proprietary. As long as you don't distribute it, you can be as closed source as you want with GPL'd code.